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UPenn Supplemental Essays 2023-24 – Prompts and Advice

August 11, 2023

The University of Pennsylvania accepted 40% of applicants back in 1980—as of 2023, that figure had plummeted to 7.4%. Those wanting to join the Quaker campus a generation ago could gain acceptance simply by producing strong grades and test scores. Today, applicants find themselves in a hyper-competitive admissions process. In 2023-24, they need to find ways to separate themselves from tens of thousands of similarly-accomplished peers. This brings us to the topic of this blog: the UPenn supplemental essays.

(Want to learn more about How to Get Into UPenn? Visit our blog entitled:  How to Get Into Penn/Wharton: Admissions Data and Strategies. Here, you’ll find all of the most recent admissions data as well as tips for gaining acceptance.)

The UPenn supplemental essays present applicants with just the opportunity they need to showcase their unique personality, writing ability, passions, and talents. Further, those who generate responses that are authentic, honest, and compelling can truly capture the attention of a Penn admissions reader.

Below are UPenn’s two general essay prompts for the 2023-24 admissions cycle. The College Transitions team also offers accompanying advice about how to tackle each one.

UPenn Supplemental Essays – Prompt #1

1) Write a short thank-you note to someone you have not yet thanked and would like to acknowledge. (We encourage you to share this note with that person, if possible, and reflect on the experience!) (150-200 words)  

In essence, this one is about how you express gratitude. A mature young person realizes that their success was not achieved in a vacuum. Rather, it was likely aided by many adults and peers. The target of your letter could be a parent, other relative, teacher, coach, spiritual leader, friend, classmate, fellow team member, or boss. This prompt, which debuted last year, is an excellent opportunity for highly-decorated applicants to display their appreciative and humble side. We recommend taking their advice and actually sharing the letter in real life. This will likely make the essay more authentic and from the heart. The more sincere your essay turns out, the better it will likely be received by UPenn (and its intended IRL target!).

UPenn Supplemental Essays – Prompt #2

2) How will you explore community at Penn? Consider how Penn will help shape your perspective and identity, and how your identity and perspective will help shape Penn. (150-200 words)  

Keep in mind that Penn has already seen the President’s Volunteer Service Award and the impressive number of hours you volunteered at multiple nonprofit organizations. They know that you have been an active member of your high school/local community. The admissions committee now desires to understand precisely how you will contribute to  their  community of almost 10,000 undergraduate students. Highlighting the link between your past efforts and future aims is critical here. For example, if you dedicated many hours working with people with Alzheimer’s Disease throughout high school, it will be more impactful when you now express your commitment to joining Penn’s Alzheimer’s Buddies organization.

The strongest Penn community essays show evidence of meaningful school-specific research. This research process will actually give you a better idea of how you would sincerely like to become engaged at each prospective school on your list. Admissions officers will appreciate a Penn-centric answer far more than a generic (often recycled from app to app) response. Moreover, given the word count, you’ll be able to produce the strongest response if you focus on just one or two specific aspects of your identity and perspective.

UPenn Supplemental Essays – School & Program-Specific Prompts

In addition to the above, you’ll also need to write an essay that is specific to the undergraduate school or coordinated dual-degree program you’re applying to. Below, we’ve covered how to approach the most popular choices:

1) The College of Arts and Sciences

The flexible structure of The College of Arts and Sciences’ curriculum is designed to inspire exploration, foster connections, and help you create a path of study through general education courses and a major. What are you curious about and how would you take advantage of opportunities in the arts and sciences? (150-200 words) 

To help inform your response, applicants are encouraged to learn more about academic offerings within the College of Arts and Sciences at  college.upenn.edu/prospective . This information will help you develop a stronger understanding of how the study of the liberal arts aligns with your own goals and aspirations.

UPenn Supplemental Essays (Continued)

In this essay, admissions officers want to see evidence of your drive, passion, and intellectual ambition. Further, they want to learn your specific plans for continuing to be academically engaged while at the University of Pennsylvania. Great things to highlight here include:

• Firstly, Specific courses offered in your discipline of interest at UPenn.
• Next,  Penn professors  whose work/research/writings you find fascinating and how you would ideally like to connect with them as an undergraduate.
• Additionally, academically-focused student organizations  at Penn.
• Undergraduate research opportunities  in the summer or during the school year as well as independent research you would like to conduct under faculty supervision.
• Lastly,  Study abroad  opportunities.

In addition to Penn-specific offerings that you are dying to take advantage of, you can also cite past experiences which will ideally be tied into future ventures. For example, if you were captain of the robotics team in high school—and hope to continue robotics in college—you might note why you’re interested in joining the UPennalizers, Penn’s student-run robotic soccer team.

2) School of Engineering and Applied Science

Penn Engineering prepares its students to become leaders in technology, by combining a strong foundation in the natural sciences and mathematics, exploration in the liberal arts, and depth of study in focused disciplinary majors. Please share how you hope to explore your engineering interests at Penn. (150-200 words) 

To help inform your response, applicants are encouraged to learn more about Penn Engineering and its mission to prepare students for global leadership in technology  here . This information will help you develop a stronger understanding of academic pathways within Penn Engineering and how they align with your goals and interests.

Similar to the prompt for the College of Arts and Sciences, you’ll want to research Penn’s engineering offerings. You’ll want to pay particularl attention to those related to your primary major of interest. You can discuss several that you find most compelling. Great things to highlight here include:

• Specific courses  offered in your discipline of interest at UPenn.
• Penn professors  whose work/research/writings you find fascinating and how you would ideally like to connect with them as an undergraduate.
• Academically-focused  student organizations  at Penn.
• Undergraduate research opportunities  in the summer or during the school year. Also, independent research you would like to conduct under faculty supervision.

3) School of Nursing

Penn Nursing intends to meet the health needs of society in a global and multicultural world by preparing its students to impact healthcare by advancing science and promoting equity. What do you think this means for the future of nursing, and how do you see yourself contributing to our mission of promoting equity in healthcare? (150-200 words)   

To help inform your response, applicants are encouraged to learn more about Penn Nursing’s mission and how we promote equity in healthcare  here .  This information will help you develop a stronger understanding of our values and how they align with your own goals and aspirations.

There are two prongs to this prompt. First, the admissions committee wants to understand how you think scientific advancements and increased equity will impact nursing as a profession. Since you’re applying to this program, it’s likely that you believe in the benefit of both objectives. Therefore, you don’t need to spend time convincing the admissions committee that you’re on board. Instead, and based on what you understand about the nursing field consider discussing what types of positive impact nurses who are prepared for the profession in such a way can have on patient outcomes and/or healthcare in general. Lastly, if you don’t know much about the current landscape, be sure to do some research,

Second, Penn wants to understand how you—as a nursing student—will contribute to the mission of promoting equity in particular. Based on what you know about Penn’s nursing programs and initiatives (which, again, will require some research) how do you see yourself getting involved?

4) The Wharton School

Wharton prepares its students to make an impact by applying business methods and economic theory to real-world problems, including economic, political, and social issues. Please reflect on a current issue of importance to you and share how you hope a Wharton education would help you to explore it. (150-200 words)  

To help inform your response, applicants are encouraged to learn more about the foundations of a Wharton education  here . This information will help you better understand what you could learn by studying at Wharton and what you could do afterward.

To craft a strong response to this prompt, you’ll first need to choose an issue that is important to you. The issue can be on either a global, regional, or community scale. If you pick something general (and popular), like climate change or AI, consider choosing a specific angle that relates to you personally. For example, while “climate change” in general is an absolutely massive undertaking that will be difficult to differentiate, discussing the impact of flooding on your city’s downtown businesses could be far more specific and accessible.

After choosing an issue and sharing why it’s important to you, you’ll then need to discuss how Wharton’s specific offerings will help you explore it. Excellent possibilities include:

5)  DMD: Digital Media Design Program

Why are you interested in the Digital Media Design (DMD) program at the University of Pennsylvania? (400-650 words)

6) Huntsman: The Huntsman Program in International Studies and Business

The Huntsman Program supports the development of globally-minded scholars who become engaged citizens, creative innovators, and ethical leaders in the public, private, and non-profit sectors in the United States and internationally. What draws you to a dual-degree program in business and international studies, and how would you use what you learn to make a contribution to a global issue where business and international affairs intersect? (400-650 words)

7) LSM: The Roy and Diana Vagelos Program in Life Sciences and Management

The LSM program aims to provide students with a fundamental understanding of the life sciences and their management with an eye to identifying, advancing and implementing innovations. What issues would you want to address using the understanding gained from such a program? Note that this essay should be distinct from your single degree essay. (400-650 words)

8) M&T: The Jerome Fisher Program in Management and Technology

• Explain how you will use the M&T program to explore your interest in business, engineering, and the intersection of the two. (400-650 words)
• Describe a problem that you solved that showed leadership and creativity. (250 words)

9) NETS: The Rajendra and Neera Singh Program in Networked and Social Systems Engineering

Describe your interests in modern networked information systems and technologies, such as the internet, and their impact on society, whether in terms of economics, communication, or the creation of beneficial content for society. Feel free to draw on examples from your own experiences as a user, developer, or student of technology. (400-650 words)

10) NHCM: Nursing and Healthcare Management

Discuss your interest in nursing and health care management. How might Penn’s coordinated dual-degree program in nursing and business help you meet your goals? (400-650 words)

11) BIO-DENT: Seven-Year Bio-Dental Program

• Please list pre-dental or pre-medical experience. This experience can include but is not limited to observation in a private practice, dental clinic, or hospital setting; dental assisting; dental laboratory work; dental or medical research, etc. Please include time allotted to each activity, dates of attendance, location, and description of your experience. If you do not have any pre-dental or pre-medical experience, please indicate what you have done or plan to do in order to explore dentistry as a career. (250 words)
• Describe any activities which demonstrate your ability to work with your hands. (250 words)
• What activities have you performed that demonstrate your ability to work effectively with people? (250 words)
• Please explain your reasons for selecting a career in dentistry. Please include what interests you the most in dentistry as well as what interests you the least. (250 words)
• Do you have relatives who are dentists or are in dental school? If so, indicate the name of each relative, his/her relationship to you, the school attended, and the dates attended.(250 words)

12) VIPER: The Roy and Diana Vagelos Integrated Program in Energy Research

How do you envision your participation in the Vagelos Integrated Program in Energy Research (VIPER) furthering your interests in energy science and technology? Please include any past experiences (ex. academic, research, or extracurricular) that have led to your interest in the program. Additionally, please indicate why you are interested in pursuing dual degrees in science and engineering and which VIPER majors are most interesting to you at this time. (400-650 words)

How important are the UPenn supplemental essays?

There are six factors that UPenn considers “very important” in evaluating a candidate and the essays are among them. In addition to the essays, UPenn gives the greatest consideration to the rigor of an applicant’s secondary school record. Of equal consideration are GPA, standardized test scores, recommendations, and character/personal qualities.

UPenn Supplemental Essays – Want Personalized Essay Assistance?

In conclusion, if you are interested in working with one of College Transitions’ experienced and knowledgeable essay coaches as you craft your UPenn supplemental essays, we encourage you to get a quote  today.

• Application Strategies
• College Essay

Andrew Belasco

A licensed counselor and published researcher, Andrew's experience in the field of college admissions and transition spans two decades. He has previously served as a high school counselor, consultant and author for Kaplan Test Prep, and advisor to U.S. Congress, reporting on issues related to college admissions and financial aid.

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October 19, 2023

Tips for Answering the University of Pennsylvania Supplemental Essay Prompts [2023 – 2024]

The University of Pennsylvania, or Penn, was established in 1790 and is one of the oldest universities in America. This prestigious Ivy League school is known for its top-notch research as well as its undergraduate programs that focus on practical applications grounded in a strong liberal arts foundation. It accepts the Common Application or the Coalition Application and requires a Penn writing supplemental in addition to the general Common/Coalition Application essay. Your supplemental essay helps Penn gain a more holistic view of you as a potential student. The Penn website states, “Our ideal candidates are inspired to emulate our founder Benjamin Franklin by applying their knowledge in ‘service to society.’” Through your Common Application, the admissions committee is aware of your grades and test scores, and understands the level of rigor in your curriculum within the context of your high school environment. Use the supplemental essay to demonstrate how you are an ideal match for Penn and how Penn will help you to accomplish your life goals. Illustrate how you engage with and think about the world around you. Communicate your thoughts, values, and perspectives so the admissions committee can understand what is important to you!

Penn offers a binding early decision option with a November 1 deadline. Consider this option if Penn is your first choice, because the rate of admission is higher during the early decision round. In addition, if Penn is your top choice and you have any alumni ties, early decision might be the best approach. In the past, candidates with alumni affiliation received the most consideration during the early decision program. Keep in mind, applying to any school via binding early decision will limit when and how you can apply to other schools. You are allowed to apply early decision to Penn and early action to other nonbinding or nonrestrictive early action programs. Always check with the specific schools for guidelines. 

Before you sit down to begin writing your essays, do your research to learn as much as possible about Penn’s approach to education. Familiarize yourself with the unique character of the school, read through the website, get a sense of the campus and academic atmosphere, visit the campus (if possible), speak with students, and imagine yourself studying at Penn. In short, identify what makes the school a good fit for you. 

Penn is located in the city of Philadelphia and offers an exceptional education in a diverse urban setting on a primarily residential campus. Penn provides many opportunities for students to investigate various areas of interest. The availability of learning hubs is an example of how the school fosters the active and dynamic exploration of ideas. Think about how you might embrace this approach and the overall academic climate at Penn.  

It should come as no surprise that Penn is steeped in tradition. Although the curriculum at Penn is flexible, it has a high-quality liberal arts and science foundation. The four undergraduate schools (College of Arts and Science, Penn Engineering, School of Nursing, and The Wharton School) pride themselves on providing an integrated and functional education. The Penn site states that students “combine theoretical and practical thinking while developing the tools they need to innovate and lead in a world that demands an increasingly broad perspective.” Consider how these values will affect your experience at Penn. 

Write a short thank-you note to someone you have not yet thanked and would like to acknowledge. (We encourage you to share this note with that person, if possible, and reflect on the experience!) (150-200 words, only required for first year applicants)

First, consider your overall application to Penn, because you want to shed light on something you have not mentioned in any detail elsewhere. The person you write to should be someone who has had a positive impact on you – on your life, your way of thinking, your identity, your interests, or in any other significant way. This is a short note, so use concise language to explain what you are thanking them for, how what they did (intentionally or not) affected you, and why you are grateful.

How will you explore community at Penn? Consider how Penn will help shape your perspective, and how your experiences and perspective will help shape Penn. (150-200 words)

This prompt is meant to address the interplay of how you might add to and benefit from the extracurricular atmosphere at Penn. How will you participate in the Penn community and contribute to it in meaningful ways? You only have 200 words in which to express what excites you most about the Penn community, provide some insight into how you might engage with it, and reveal how you might both enhance and grow from it based on your individual identity and perspective. Among other things, this prompt provides an opportunity to express your cultural background and unique interests. Consider the diverse population of students and their experiences in light of your own identity and perspectives. 

Also consider the Penn community within the context of the city of Philadelphia. Remember that Penn’s founder, Ben Franklin, was focused on service to society, and that begins with the dynamic community around you and expands from there. Overlay your individual story with the community at Penn. This essay requires you to look at your identity and perspective and to consider the ways in which you mesh with the Penn community. How might it affect you, and likewise, what impact might you have on those around you? What do you bring with you based on your life experience? What might you gain though your potential interactions/opportunities/exchanges with others in the community at Penn?

The school-specific prompt will now be unique to the school to which a student is applying. Considering the undergraduate school you have selected, please respond to your school-specific prompt below. (For example, all applicants applying to the College of Arts and Sciences will respond to the prompt under the “College of Arts and Sciences” section).

For students applying to the coordinated dual-degree and specialized programs, please answer this question in regard to your single-degree school choice; your interest in the coordinated dual-degree or specialized program may be addressed through the program-specific essay.

For this response, you will address the school-specific prompt (School of Nursing, College of Arts and Science, The Wharton School, or School or Engineering and Applied Science) in 150-200 words.

Although each prompt is slightly different based on the school to which you are applying, the underlying question is the same: how does Penn support your intellectual and academic interests, and how do your goals align with the specific mission of the school? Do your research into your school of choice. How will it prepare you to achieve your goals? You must demonstrate an understanding of yourself by articulating your personal connection to the program’s mission. Consider why you are a good fit for the undergraduate school (College of Arts and Sciences, School of Nursing, The Wharton School, or Penn Engineering). What specific academic, service, and/or research opportunities might enhance your journey and help you accomplish your goals? Include examples of how your personal experiences make the program at Penn a good fit for you. How will the opportunities at Penn expand, nurture, and support your interests and aspirations? In closing, remember to address why you are driven to attend the program at Penn and how a Penn education will help you to effect change in the world.

Students applying to dual-degree and specialized programs should address the prompts above in terms of the single-degree school choice in your response. Your interest in the coordinated or specialized program can be addressed in your program-specific essay. 

Note that additional essays are required if you are applying to one of the Coordinated Dual Degree and Specialized Programs offered at Penn. These responses have limits that range from 400 to 650 words. Although these individual prompts are not addressed in detail here, keep in mind that each one asks you to share specific examples and experiences that demonstrate your potential for success, along with your enthusiasm for and attraction to the particular program. These programs are a significant commitment, so you need to convey your genuine dedication. The admissions committee uses your essays to determine whether you will be a good match for the particular dual degree or specialized program to which you seek admission. 

This is a competitive application process, and you are up against an increasingly competitive group of applicants. Although Penn withheld admission rates for the Class of 2027 in an effort to put the focus back on students rather than low admissions rates, it received 59,463 undergraduate applications, and only 2,420 enrolled in the first-year class. If we look back at previous years that had fewer total applicants and similar class sizes, the acceptance rate for the Class of 2027 is likely in the 4% to 6% range. 

Here are a few more numbers to consider. Over 90% of the students admitted were in the top 10% of their high school class, with an average SAT score of 1535 and an average ACT score of 34.5. Effectively communicating the intangibles through your essays is the best way to differentiate yourself among this prestigious crowd. Use your essay responses to discuss what is meaningful to you, project the value you could add to the campus community, and convey how Penn is the ideal place for you to achieve your dreams for the future.

Take a deep breath, and try not to be intimidated by this process. Start early to allow yourself enough time to thoroughly research, prepare, and complete all aspects of your application. All these components must come together in a compelling way to present you as a highly competitive applicant. Penn is interested in your personal stories, life experiences, hopes, and aspirations. It seeks to attract and foster great thinkers and future leaders who will play constructive roles in society. Take the appropriate time and invest the necessary energy to reveal your best self!

Marie Todd has been involved in college admissions for more than 20 years. Marie has both counseled applicants to top colleges and evaluated more than 5,000 applications for the University of Michigan’s College of Literature, Science, and the Arts; College of Engineering; School of Kinesiology; School of Nursing; and Taubman College of Architecture. Want Marie to help you get accepted? Click here to get in touch .

Related Resources:

• Five Fatal Flaws to Avoid in Your College Application Essays
• Four Ways to Show How You’ll Contribute in the Future
• Three Tips for Parents of Applicants

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How to write the UPenn essays

The recording will load in a moment., about this livestream, university of pennsylvania | upenn.

Last week, we covered UPenn’s admissions process, from academics to extracurriculars and beyond. In this stream, Aja, a recent UPenn graduate, will go in-depth on how to write the essays for the University of Pennsylvania.

We’ll cover how to write the two all-applicant essays, as well as essays for specific programs. We’ll also cover supplements for The Huntsman Program, The Digital Media Design Program, The Life Sciences and Management Program, the Jerome Fisher Management and Technology Program, the NETS Engineering program, the VIPER program, the Nursing and Healthcare Management Program, and the Bio-Dental Program.

If you’re interested in one of these selective programs, you should definitely stop by this stream!

Undergrad College: University of Pennsylvania '2021

Major: Linguistics, Cognitive Science

Graduate College: University of Edinburgh

Work Experience: Throughout my advising career, I’ve helped tons of students craft their perfect admissions narrative, nail their interviews, maximize their standardized test scores and ultimately, gain acceptance to their dream schools! During undergrad, I worked as an RA in two research labs, culminating in published work, in addition to serving as a near-peer public speaking coach. I am currently completing my MSc in Evolution of Language and Cognition at the University of Edinburgh.

My Admissions Story: As a low-income student, I had no idea how to approach college admissions. I remember looking at the sticker prices for the schools I was interested in and worrying that college might not actually be for me. Fortunately, I was able to find my way, navigating the complex process of admissions and aid. I’m so excited to be in a position to help other students who feel as I once did.

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UPenn Supplemental Essays 2023-2024

By Eric Eng

The application process, a critical gateway to this journey, demands academic excellence and a profound understanding of oneself and one’s aspirations. UPenn’s supplemental essays for 2023-2024 are a series of thoughtfully crafted prompts designed to unveil multi-faceted personalities. Also, they showcase the diverse backgrounds and unique ambitions of aspiring students.

How Many Supplemental Essays Does UPenn Require?

For the 2023-2024 admissions cycle, the University of Pennsylvania requires applicants to complete a set of two mandatory short answer prompts , each designed to uncover different facets of the applicant’s personality, experiences, and aspirations.

Additionally, depending on the specific undergraduate school to which a student is applying – the School of Nursing, College of Arts and Sciences, The Wharton School, or the School of Engineering and Applied Science – there is an additional essay requirement.

This structure of UPenn’s supplemental essays 2023-2024 underscores the university’s commitment to comprehensively understanding its applicants. It’s a deliberate approach, ensuring that each student’s application reflects academic prowess, personal growth, community engagement, and a clear vision for their future.

Breakdown of the Short Answer Prompts and the School-Specific Essay

Delving into the specifics, the first of UPenn’s supplemental essays 2023-2024 is a short thank-you note, a prompt that invites applicants to express gratitude to someone who has made a significant impact on their life. This exercise is not just about politeness; it reflects character and insight into the relationships and values that shape the applicant.

The second prompt asks students to contemplate their potential engagement with the Penn community. Here, applicants must intertwine their narratives with their aspirations for community involvement at UPenn , showcasing how their unique perspectives will contribute to and benefit from the university’s dynamic environment.

The third prompt requires a more focused approach, depending on the chosen undergraduate school. For instance, applicants to the School of Nursing might discuss their passion for healthcare and how UPenn’s program aligns with their career goals. At the same time, those applying to The Wharton School could delve into their fascination with business and entrepreneurship. These school-specific essays demonstrate why the applicant wants to attend UPenn and why they are a perfect fit for their chosen program.

Each essay, though distinct in its theme, collectively forms a narrative arc that encapsulates the applicant’s past achievements, present motivations, and future aspirations, all while underlining their suitability for the unique academic and social fabric of the University of Pennsylvania.

What are the UPenn Supplemental Essays 2023-2024?

UPenn’s supplemental essays 2023-2024 are a crucial component of the application process. It offers a platform for students to present aspects of their personality and intellect that standardized test scores and transcripts cannot capture.

• W rite a short thank-you note to someone you have not yet thanked and would like to acknowledge. (We encourage you to share this note with that person, if possible, and reflect on the experience!) (150-200 words, only required for first year applicants)
• H ow will you explore community at Penn? Consider how Penn will help shape your perspective, and how your experiences and perspective will help shape Penn. (150-200 words)
• (The school-specific prompt will now be unique to the school a student is applying to.)

For the 2023-2024 admissions cycle, these prompts include a unique thank-you note, a reflection on the community at Penn, and a school-specific essay that varies depending on the undergraduate program to which the student is applying. Navigating these prompts requires both eloquence and honesty and a strategic understanding of how each essay can collectively paint a comprehensive and compelling picture of the applicant.

How to Write the UPenn Essays 2023-2024?

Writing the UPenn supplemental essays for the 2023-2024 admissions cycle is a task that requires introspection, creativity, and strategic thinking. These essays are your opportunity to show the admissions committee who you are beyond your grades and test scores.

Remember, quality over quantity is vital. Each word should serve a purpose in conveying your message. Finally, proofread your essays meticulously to ensure they are free of grammatical errors and flow well.

UPenn Supplemental Essay 1: The Thank-You Note Short Answer

The first of UPenn’s supplemental essays, 2023-2024, a short thank-you note, is a unique prompt that stands out for its emphasis on gratitude and personal reflection.

Write a short thank-you note to someone you have not yet thanked and would like to acknowledge. (We encourage you to share this note with that person, if possible, and reflect on the experience!) 

This essay, limited to 150-200 words, is not just an exercise in writing but an opportunity for applicants to delve into their personal experiences and relationships. It challenges students to identify and articulate their appreciation for someone who has made a significant, yet perhaps unrecognized, impact on their lives.

Understanding UPenn Supplemental Essay 1

The first UPenn supplemental essay prompt for 2023-2024 requires you to write a short thank-you note to someone you have not yet thanked but would like to acknowledge. This prompt is unique as it focuses on gratitude and personal reflection.

It’s an opportunity to showcase your ability to recognize and appreciate the impact others have had on your life. This essay should reveal your character, values, and the relationships that have shaped you. It’s not just about whom you choose to thank but also about how you express your gratitude and what this says about you.

Brainstorming Your Response to UPenn Supplemental Essay 1

When brainstorming your response to this essay, consider the following:

• Identify the Person: Think about someone who has significantly impacted your life. This could be a teacher, coach, family member, or friend.
• Reflect on the Impact: What specific actions or qualities of this person have influenced you? How have they helped shape your perspectives or choices?
• Personal Growth: How has this person’s influence contributed to your growth? Consider moments of challenge, inspiration, or change.
• Unique Angle: Find a unique angle or a specific instance that encapsulates their impact rather than general statements of gratitude.
• Emotional Connection: Reflect on the emotions you associate with this person. Gratitude, respect, admiration, or inspiration can be good starting points.

Structuring Your Response to UPenn Supplemental Essay 1

In structuring your response, follow a clear and concise format:

• Introduction: Start with a direct address to the person you are thanking. Briefly introduce them and the reason for your gratitude.
• Body: Elaborate on the impact they have had on your life. Use specific examples or anecdotes to illustrate this.
• Reflection: Reflect on how this person’s influence has shaped you. Connect this to your broader life experiences or aspirations.
• Conclusion: Close with a heartfelt statement of thanks, summarizing the essence of your gratitude and its significance in your life.

Remember, this essay is as much about you as it is about the person you are thanking. It should provide insights into your character and values, demonstrating your capacity for reflection and appreciation.

UPenn Supplemental Essay 2: Your Perspective and Contribution

The second prompt of UPenn’s supplemental essays 2023-2024 invites applicants to reflect on their potential engagement with the Penn community.

How will you explore community at Penn? Consider how Penn will help shape your perspective, and how your experiences and perspective will help shape Penn. 

This question is about what you hope to gain from being a part of this vibrant community and what you can contribute to it. It’s an invitation to envision your place within the diverse mosaic of Penn’s student body. This essay should blend introspection and foresight, showcasing your understanding of what community means at home like UPenn.

Understanding UPenn Supplemental Essay 2

The second UPenn supplemental essay for the 2023-2024 admissions cycle asks you to reflect on your potential role within the Penn community. This prompt is designed to gauge your understanding of being part of a diverse and dynamic university community. It’s an opportunity to demonstrate how you envision yourself contributing to and benefiting from the Penn environment.

The key here is to show a mutual relationship: how Penn’s community will influence you and, in turn, how you will add value to it. This essay should highlight your ability to engage with others, your willingness to embrace new perspectives, and your desire to actively participate in university life.

It’s also a chance to showcase your understanding of Penn’s values and how they align with yours. Remember, this essay isn’t just about your academic interests; it’s about your character, your passions, and how you see yourself fitting into the broader Penn community.

Brainstorming Your Response to UPenn Supplemental Essay 2

When brainstorming your response, consider the following points:

• Personal Interests and Passions: Identify your fundamental interests and passions and how they might align with clubs, organizations, or initiatives at Penn.
• Community Involvement: Reflect on your past experiences with community involvement. What have you learned from these experiences, and how can you apply these lessons at Penn?
• Penn’s Resources: Research specific resources, programs, or opportunities at Penn that excite you. How do you plan to take advantage of these?
• Personal Growth: Think about how being part of the Penn community might challenge and contribute to your growth.
• Contribution to Penn: Consider what unique perspectives or skills you can bring to the Penn community. How will you make a positive impact?
• Long-term Vision: How does being part of the Penn community fit your long-term goals or aspirations?

Structuring Your Response to UPenn Supplemental Essay 2

In structuring your response, consider the following format:

• Introduction: Begin by briefly introducing your main interest or passion and how it relates to your desire to be part of the Penn community.
• Body: In the body of your essay, delve into specific aspects of the Penn community that align with your interests. Discuss how you plan to engage with these aspects and what you hope to gain from the experience. Also, detail how your past experiences and perspectives will contribute to the Penn community. Use specific examples to illustrate your points.
• Conclusion: Summarize how your involvement in the Penn community will mutually benefit you. Emphasize how Penn will help shape your perspective and how you, in turn, will contribute to the Penn community. This should tie back to your introduction, creating a cohesive narrative that clearly articulates your vision for your time at Penn.

UPenn’s Supplemental Essay 3: School-Specific Prompts

The school-specific prompts in UPenn’s supplemental essays 2023-2024 are designed to assess an applicant’s fit and enthusiasm for their chosen field of study. These prompts vary across the School of Nursing, College of Arts and Sciences, The Wharton School, and the School of Engineering and Applied Science, each asking for a nuanced understanding of the school’s ethos and how the applicant’s interests align with it.

• Short Answer Prompt for School of Nursing : Penn Nursing intends to meet the health needs of society in a global and multicultural world by preparing its students to impact healthcare by advancing science and promoting equity. What do you think this means for the future of nursing, and how do you see yourself contributing to our mission of promoting equity in healthcare? (150-200 words)
• Short Answer Prompt for College of Arts and Sciences : The flexible structure of The College of Arts and Sciences’ curriculum is designed to inspire exploration, foster connections, and help you create a path of study through general education courses and a major. What are you curious about and how would you take advantage of opportunities in the arts and sciences? (150-200 words)
• Short Answer Prompt for The Wharton School : Wharton prepares its students to make an impact by applying business methods and economic theory to real-world problems, including economic, political, and social issues.  Please reflect on a current issue of importance to you and share how you hope a Wharton education would help you to explore it.  (150-200 words)
• Short Answer Prompt for School of Engineering and Applied Science : Penn Engineering prepares its students to become leaders in technology, by combining a strong foundation in the natural sciences and mathematics, exploration in the liberal arts, and depth of study in focused disciplinary majors. Please share how you hope to explore your engineering interests at Penn. (150-200 words)

Each response should reflect your understanding of these unique aspects and how they resonate with your academic and professional goals. This is not just about stating your desire to study at a particular school; it’s about demonstrating a thoughtful and informed connection between your aspirations and what the school uniquely offers.

Understanding UPenn’s School-Specific Prompts

UPenn Supplemental Essay 3 is unique to the specific undergraduate school you are applying to. This essay is crucial as it allows you to demonstrate your understanding of and alignment with the school’s ethos and objectives.

For the School of Nursing, the focus is on how you perceive the future of nursing in a global and multicultural context and your role in promoting equity in healthcare. The College of Arts and Sciences prompt asks about your curiosities and how you plan to explore them through their flexible curriculum. The Wharton School seeks to understand how you would apply your education to a current issue that matters to you. Lastly, the School of Engineering and Applied Science wants to know how you plan to pursue your engineering interests at Penn, emphasizing a combination of natural sciences, liberal arts, and focused majors.

Each prompt requires a tailored response that reflects your interests, goals, and how they align with the school’s mission.

Brainstorming Your Response to UPenn’s School-Specific Prompts

For each school, consider the following brainstorming ideas:

School of Nursing:

• Reflect on what equity in healthcare means to you.
• Think about experiences or observations that have shaped your understanding of healthcare disparities.
• Consider how you can contribute to advancing science and promoting equity in nursing.

College of Arts and Sciences:

• Identify areas of curiosity or specific interests within arts and sciences.
• Explore how the college’s curriculum can help you pursue these interests.
• Consider how a broad education can contribute to your personal and academic growth.

The Wharton School:

• Choose a current economic, political, or social issue you are passionate about.
• Reflect on how a business education can help you understand and address this issue.
• Consider the specific aspects of Wharton’s program that align with your interests.

School of Engineering and Applied Science:

• Identify your specific engineering interests and how they developed.
• Explore how Penn Engineering’s approach to education aligns with your goals.
• Think about the role of liberal arts in shaping your engineering perspective.

Structuring Your Response to UPenn’s School-Specific Prompts

Your essay should be structured to clearly and concisely address the prompt:

• Introduction: Begin by directly addressing the prompt, setting the stage for your response. Introduce your main interest or the issue you are passionate about.
• Body: In the body, delve into how your interests, experiences, and goals align with the school’s mission and offerings. Use specific examples to illustrate your points and show a deep understanding of the school’s ethos.
• Conclusion: Summarize how your education at this specific school will help you achieve your goals and contribute to the school’s mission. This should reflect your introduction, creating a cohesive narrative that underscores your enthusiasm and readiness for the program.

As we conclude our exploration into UPenn’s supplemental essays 2023-2024, it’s evident that these are more than just a requirement for your college application; they are a profound opportunity for self-expression and self-discovery.

Each essay serves a distinct purpose, allowing you to showcase different facets of your personality, intellect, and aspirations. The University of Pennsylvania, through these prompts, seeks to understand not just your academic capabilities but also your character, values, and vision for the future.

These essays are your chance to step beyond the numbers and lists of achievements that make up the rest of your application, offering a glimpse into who you are as a person and how you see yourself fitting into and contributing to the Penn community.

Recap of the Key Points for Each Type of Supplemental Essay

In recapitulating the critical points for each supplemental essay type, remember that the thank-you note is an exercise in gratitude and reflection , allowing you to acknowledge someone who has impacted your life. It’s a chance to show depth, empathy, and the ability to appreciate the roles others have played in your journey.

The essay on exploring community at Penn is where you align your personal experiences and aspirations with the ethos of the Penn community , demonstrating how you intend to engage with and contribute to it.

The school-specific essays require a tailored approach , reflecting your understanding of and fit for the school you are applying to. Whether it’s the School of Nursing, College of Arts and Sciences, The Wharton School, or the School of Engineering and Applied Science, your response should testify to your informed interest and alignment with the school’s unique offerings and values.

Ready to Elevate Your UPenn Application? Discover How AdmissionSight Can Guide You

Embarking on your journey to the prestigious University of Pennsylvania requires more than just academic excellence; it demands a compelling narrative through your application essays. At AdmissionSight , we specialize in transforming your aspirations and experiences into powerful narratives that resonate with UPenn’s admissions committee. Our expert team, well-versed in the nuances of UPenn’s supplemental essays 2023-2024, is dedicated to helping you craft essays that not only meet but exceed the expectations of the admissions officers.

Whether articulating gratitude in a thank-you note, showcasing your vision for community involvement, or tailoring your response to the specific undergraduate school of your choice, our consultants provide personalized guidance at every step. We understand these essays’ unique challenges and opportunities and are committed to helping you navigate them confidently and creatively.

Make sure to let the complexity of the application process dim your chances of getting into UPenn. Join the ranks of our successful clients who have made their dream of attending top-tier universities a reality. Contact AdmissionSight today for a consultation and take the first step toward crafting an outstanding application. Let us help you turn your Penn aspirations into achievements.

Want to assess your chances of admission? Take our FREE chances calculator today!

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How To Answer UPenn's 2023/24 Supplemental Essays: Tips & Insights

What's New in 23/24?

What Are UPenn's 2023/24 Essay Prompts?

Short Answer Questions

School Specific Questions

Dual Degree & Specialized Programs Qs

General Guidelines

The University of Pennsylvania's supplemental essays for the 2023/24 admissions cycle delve into applicants' gratitude, community perspectives, and alignment with specific schools and specialized programs within the university. With new school-specific prompts and detailed questions for coordinated dual-degree and specialized programs, UPenn seeks to understand applicants' unique stories, motivations, and fit with their chosen academic paths. Applicants must navigate through these meticulously crafted prompts, ensuring authentic, insightful, and well-researched responses highlighting their fit, contributions, and aspirations within UPenn's diverse and dynamic community. Explore our detailed guide and examples to craft compelling essays that resonate with UPenn’s ethos and your personal narrative.

What did Upenn students write their Common App essays about?

UPenn's 2023/24 Supplemental Essay Updates: What's Changed?

Achieving admission to the University of Pennsylvania , with its selective acceptance rate of around 4% , is a remarkable feat. In the nuanced arena of college admissions, your supplemental essays are crucial in illustrating your unique story and alignment with UPenn's values.

Prestigious institutions like UPenn meticulously refine their application processes each academic year to ensure they acquire a thorough understanding of their prospective students.

For the 2023/24 admissions cycle, UPenn has instituted several key changes to its supplemental essay questions:

• Introduction of School-Specific Prompts: Each undergraduate school within UPenn now presents a unique question, reflecting its educational ethos and mission. This change underscores the university's emphasis on ensuring applicants have a deep understanding and alignment with the specific values and focus of the school to which they apply.
• The School of Nursing is emphasizing its commitment to addressing global health needs and promoting healthcare equity.
• The College of Arts and Sciences is highlighting its flexible curriculum that encourages exploration and the creation of interdisciplinary connections.
• The Wharton School focuses on the practical application of business strategies and economic theories to address real-world challenges.
• The School of Engineering and Applied Science is spotlighting its integrative approach to technology education, blending natural sciences, mathematics, and liberal arts.
• Introduction of Coordinated Dual Degree and Specialized Programs Short Answer Prompts: For students applying to the coordinated dual-degree and specialized programs, U Penn has introduced specific essay prompts to gain deeper insights into the applicants' specific interests and motivations in these specialized areas.

DMD: Digital Media Design Program

Huntsman: the huntsman program in international studies and business, lsm: the roy and diana vagelos program in life sciences and management.

• M&T: The Jerome Fisher Program in Management and Technology

NETS: The Rajendra and Neera Singh Program in Networked and Social Systems Engineering

Nhcm: nursing and healthcare management.

• Seven-Year Bio-Dental Program

VIPER: The Roy and Diana Vagelos Integrated Program in Energy Research

• New Essay Requirement for Transfer Students: A new essay question has been introduced specifically for transfer students, seeking to understand their motivations for transferring and their aspirations in changing their educational institution.

These updates indicate UPenn's evolving admissions approach, emphasizing a heightened emphasis on ensuring a mutual fit and understanding between the applicant and the specific school within the university they seek to attend. It reflects a commitment to fostering a student body that is deeply aligned with the values, focus, and mission of their respective schools and the university.

What Are UPenn's Supplemental Essay Prompts for 2023/24?

Embarking on the application journey to the University of Pennsylvania necessitates a thorough understanding of its supplemental essay prompts, which are meticulously designed to gain a deeper insight into the applicants’ profiles. These prompts are crafted to explore your gratitude, perspectives on community, reasons for transferring (for transfer students), and your alignment with the ethos of the specific school within UPenn to which you are applying.

Penn Supplemental Short Answer Prompts (Required)

• Thank-You Note: Write a short thank-you note to someone unthanked and reflect on the experience. (150-200 words)
• Exploring Community: Discuss how you will explore community at Penn and how your experiences and perspectives will shape it. (150-200 words)

Transfer Essay (Required for Transfer Applicants)

• Detail your reasons for transferring and what you hope to gain by changing institutions. (4150 characters)

School-Specific Prompts

• School of Nursing: Reflect on the future of nursing concerning global health needs and promoting equity, and how you see yourself contributing to promoting equity in healthcare. (150-200 words)
• College of Arts and Sciences: Describe your curiosities and how you would leverage the flexible curriculum of The College of Arts and Sciences to explore them. (150-200 words)
• The Wharton School: Reflect on a current issue of importance to you and how a Wharton education would help you explore it. (150-200 words)
• School of Engineering and Applied Science: Share how you hope to explore your engineering interests at Penn, considering its mission to prepare students for global leadership in technology. (150-200 words)

Coordinated Dual Degree and Specialized Programs Short Answer Prompts

For students applying to the coordinated dual-degree and specialized programs, UPenn has introduced specific essay prompts to gain deeper insights into the applicants' specific interests and motivations in these specialized areas.

• DMD: Digital Media Design Program: Why are you interested in the Digital Media Design (DMD) program at the University of Pennsylvania? (400-650 words)
• Huntsman: The Huntsman Program in International Studies and Business: What draws you to a dual-degree program in business and international studies, and how would you use what you learn to contribute to a global issue where business and international affairs intersect? (400-650 words)
• LSM: The Roy and Diana Vagelos Program in Life Sciences and Management: What issues would you want to address using the understanding gained from such a program? Note that this essay should be distinct from your single degree essay. (400-650 words)
• M&T: The Jerome Fisher Program in Management and Technology: Explain how you will use the M&T program to explore your interest in business, engineering, and the intersection of the two. (400-650 words) Describe a problem that you solved that showed leadership and creativity. (250 words)
• NETS: The Rajendra and Neera Singh Program in Networked and Social Systems Engineering: Describe your interests in modern networked information systems and technologies, such as the internet, and their impact on society, whether in terms of economics, communication, or the creation of beneficial content for society. (400-650 words)
• NHCM: Nursing and Healthcare Management: Discuss your interest in nursing and health care management. How might Penn's coordinated dual-degree program in nursing and business help you meet your goals? (400-650 words)
• Seven-Year Bio-Dental Program: Please list any predental or premedical experience. This experience can include but is not limited to observation in a private practice, dental clinic, or hospital setting; dental assisting; dental laboratory work; dental or medical research; etc. Please include time allotted to each activity, dates of attendance, location, and a description of your experience. If you do not have any predental or premedical experience, please indicate what you have done or plan to do in order to explore dentistry as a career.
• VIPER: The Roy and Diana Vagelos Integrated Program in Energy Research: How do you envision your participation in the Vagelos Integrated Program in Energy Research (VIPER) furthering your interests in energy science and technology? (400-650 words)

UPenn’s application process is notably competitive, and these prompts offer a unique opportunity to showcase your gratitude, community perspective, and the distinct perspectives you'll bring to the UPenn community.

Explore these UPenn essay examples for further inspiration to see what successful applications entail!

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How to Answer UPenn’s Short Answer Questions?

“write a short thank-you note to someone you have not yet thanked and would like to acknowledge. (we encourage you to share this note with that person, if possible, and reflect on the experience)”, - 150 to 200 words.

This prompt invites you to express gratitude and reflect on the impact of kindness, support, or mentorship. It provides a glimpse into your values, relationships, and ability to acknowledge and appreciate the people around you .

Express Genuine Gratitude

Ensure that your thank-you note emanates sincerity and genuine appreciation. Choose someone whose impact or gesture truly made a difference in your life, and express your gratitude authentically and heartfeltly.

Be Specific

Detail the specific act, gesture, or support you are thankful for. Clearly articulate what it meant to you and how it impacted you. Specificity conveys sincerity and provides a clearer picture of your relationship and the context.

Reflect on the Experience

Don’t just stop at the thank-you note. Dive deeper into reflection, exploring how expressing this overdue gratitude felt and what it taught you about appreciation, relationships, and acknowledgment.

Connect to Personal Growth

If possible, link the act of gratitude to your personal development or perspective. How did this act of kindness or support shape you, and how does it inspire you to act moving forward?

Example Response

Dear Mrs. Anderson, I am writing to express my heartfelt gratitude for your unwavering support during my high school journey. Your encouragement to explore my interest in environmental science, even facilitating my independent project on local ecosystems, has been pivotal in shaping my academic path and personal growth. Your belief in my potential has not only bolstered my confidence but also inspired me to advocate for environmental causes. I have not only learned about science from you but also about the impact of kindness, mentorship, and belief in someone’s potential. Thank you for being a remarkable educator and mentor. Reflecting on this, I realize the power of expressing gratitude and acknowledging the impactful gestures of others. Sharing this note with you has been a heartwarming and enlightening experience, reminding me of the importance of appreciating and vocalizing our thankfulness. It has inspired me to be more vocal in expressing gratitude and to pay forward the kindness and support I have received. Warm regards, [Your Name]

UPenn's first prompt is an invitation to expressing genuine gratitude and sincere reflective insight. It allows you to showcase your appreciation for impactful relationships and gestures while providing a window into your values, emotional intelligence, and interpersonal relationships . Ensure your response is genuine, specific, and reflective, offering a glimpse into your character and personal growth.

“How will you explore community at Penn? Consider how Penn will help shape your perspective, and how your experiences and perspective will help shape Penn.”

This prompt seeks to understand your perspective on community, past experiences with community involvement , and how you plan to engage with and contribute to the Penn community.

Integrate Past and Future Community Involvement

Reflect on your community involvement and how those experiences have shaped your perspective and values. Then, consider how you will transfer these experiences and values into your future involvement at Penn.

Explore Specific Opportunities at Penn

Research and identify specific communities, groups, or opportunities at Penn that align with your interests and past experiences. Be specific about how you plan to engage with these communities and what you hope to contribute and learn.

Reflect on Mutual Growth

Consider how being a part of the Penn community will shape your perspective and experiences and vice versa. How will you grow from being a part of Penn, and how will Penn grow from having you as a part of its community?

In my neighborhood, I initiated a project, "Tech for Seniors," where we assisted elderly individuals in navigating digital platforms, bridging a generational and technological divide. This experience taught me the power of inclusivity, empathy, and the impact of collective efforts in community building. At Penn, I am drawn to the Penn Aging Research Center, where I aspire to merge my interest in technology and community service to enhance the quality of life for the elderly population. Furthermore, I am excited to engage with the Civic House, utilizing its resources to extend my community involvement, particularly in addressing technological disparities in local communities. I envision contributing to Penn by bringing my passion for technological literacy and community service, fostering a spirit of inclusivity and collaborative impact. Simultaneously, being immersed in Penn’s diverse and socially active environment will undoubtedly broaden my understanding of community needs and innovative service, shaping a mutually enriching journey.

UPenn's second prompt is a canvas for you to illustrate your understanding and commitment to community involvement. By revealing how your past experiences, values, and future aspirations will intertwine with the Penn community, you can effectively communicate your potential contributions to academic and campus life at Penn while spotlighting how’ll you’ll benefit as well . Ensure your response is genuine, specific, and reflective, demonstrating a clear vision of your community-engaged journey at Penn.

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School Specific Prompts

School of nursing, “penn nursing intends to meet the health needs of society in a global and multicultural world by preparing its students to impact healthcare by advancing science and promoting equity. what do you think this means for the future of nursing, and how do you see yourself contributing to our mission of promoting equity in healthcare”.

This prompt seeks to understand your perspective on the future of nursing , particularly in the context of global health needs and promoting equity, and how you envision contributing to this future through Penn Nursing.

Understand and Align with Penn Nursing’s Mission

Before crafting your response, delve into Penn Nursing’s mission and initiatives toward promoting healthcare equity. Understand how they integrate science and social equity in their curriculum and community involvement. Aligning your response with their values and initiatives demonstrates a strong fit and genuine interest in Penn Nursing.

Reflect on the Future of Nursing

Consider the evolving needs of global and multicultural societies in healthcare. Think about how advancements in science and a focus on equity can shape the future of nursing, addressing disparities and enhancing healthcare outcomes.

Personal Contribution towards Equity in Healthcare

Reflect on your experiences, aspirations, and the skills you hope to gain from Penn Nursing. How will these enable you to contribute to advancing science and promoting equity in healthcare in the future?

Penn Nursing's mission resonates with my experiences volunteering in underserved communities, where I witnessed stark healthcare disparities. The integration of advanced science and a staunch commitment to equity at Penn Nursing signifies a future where healthcare transcends barriers, ensuring accessible and quality care for all demographics, irrespective of socio-economic and cultural divides. I interpret this as a call to mold nursing professionals who are not only proficient in medical science but also champions of social equity. My aspiration is to specialize in pediatric care with a focus on mental health, an often-neglected facet in multicultural societies. Leveraging Penn Nursing’s robust curriculum and its emphasis on equitable healthcare, I aim to develop programs that address mental health in children from marginalized communities, ensuring they receive adept care and support. My commitment is to ensure that advancements in healthcare science and practices are accessible and beneficial to all layers of society, aligning with Penn Nursing’s mission to promote healthcare equity on a global scale.

UPenn's School of Nursing prompt provides a platform to showcase your understanding of the intricate balance between scientific advancement and social equity in healthcare. By aligning your experiences, aspirations, and the skills you hope to acquire from Penn Nursing, you can effectively communicate your potential role in shaping a future in nursing that is scientifically advanced and equitably accessible. Ensure your response is well-researched, genuine and demonstrates how you and Penn Nursing can mutually contribute to each other and the broader healthcare landscape.

College of Arts and Sciences

“the flexible structure of the college of arts and sciences’ curriculum is designed to inspire exploration, foster connections, and help you create a path of study through general education courses and a major. what are you curious about and how would you take advantage of opportunities in the arts and sciences ”.

This prompt invites you to explore your academic curiosity and how you plan to navigate through the College of Arts and Sciences flexible curriculum to forge your educational and career path.

Deep Dive into the College of Arts and Sciences

Ensure you thoroughly understand the College of Arts and Sciences offerings and structure . Explore the general education courses, majors, and any unique programs or opportunities that pique your interest. Demonstrating knowledge about specific aspects of the college’s curriculum and how they align with your aspirations will underscore your genuine interest and fit.

Express Your Curiosity

Identify and articulate the areas within arts and sciences that you are eager to explore. This could be a specific field of study, interdisciplinary interests, or particular courses and programs. Ensure your curiosity is genuine and resonates with your experiences and aspirations.

Leverage Opportunities

Discuss how you plan to utilize the flexible structure of the curriculum to explore your interests, make connections between different fields, and carve out your unique academic and career path. Mention specific courses, professors, research opportunities, or extracurricular activities with which you plan to engage.

My curiosity lies at the intersection of psychology and visual arts, exploring how art can be utilized as a therapeutic tool. The College of Arts and Sciences at UPenn, with its flexible curriculum, provides a fertile ground to explore this interdisciplinary interest. I am particularly drawn to the “Visual Studies” major, which allows an exploration of perception and representation through various lenses, including psychological. I aim to leverage the “Independent Study” option to delve into art therapy, under the mentorship of professors who specialize in related fields, such as Professor [Professor's Name], whose work in [specific area] resonates with my interests. Furthermore, engaging with organizations like the “Penn Art & Culture Collective” will allow me to practically apply my learnings and contribute to the community. My goal is to weave a path that intertwines psychological theories with art practices, developing therapeutic modules that can be utilized in mental health interventions, thereby navigating through the rich and flexible curriculum that the College of Arts and Sciences offers to forge a career that amalgamates art and psychology.

The College of Arts and Sciences prompt seeks to understand your academic curiosity and how you plan to navigate and leverage their flexible curriculum to explore your interests and carve your path. Ensure your response is informed, genuine, and demonstrates how the College of Arts and Sciences will facilitate your academic and career journey in the arts and sciences . Your response should reflect a well-thought-out plan that aligns with your interests and the college's offerings.

The Wharton School

“wharton prepares its students to make an impact by applying business methods and economic theory to real-world problems, including economic, political, and social issues.  please reflect on a current issue of importance to you and share how you hope a wharton education would help you to explore it. ”.

This prompt seeks to understand your awareness of global issues, your perspective on them, and how you envision utilizing a Wharton education to address these challenges.

Identify a Pertinent Issue

Choose a current issue that genuinely concerns you. This could be related to economics, social justice, environmental sustainability, or any other domain that intersects with business practices and economic theories.

Understand Wharton’s Offerings

Ensure you have a deep understanding of what Wharton offers . Explore specific courses, professors, research initiatives, and clubs that align with your interest in the chosen issue. Demonstrating a clear understanding of how Wharton can help you explore and address the issue will underline your genuine interest and fit.

Connect Issue, Education, and Future Impact

Articulate how a Wharton education will equip you with the knowledge, skills, and network to positively impact the issue you've identified. Be specific about how certain aspects of Wharton’s offerings will facilitate your exploration and solution-building related to the issue.

The growing wealth gap, exacerbated by the pandemic, is a pressing issue that intertwines economics and social justice. Wharton’s emphasis on applying economic theory to real-world problems aligns seamlessly with my aspiration to develop scalable solutions for income disparity. The “Business Economics and Public Policy” major, with courses like “Business in the Global Political Environment,” directly speaks to my interest in understanding and navigating the intersection of economics, business, and policy to address socio-economic disparities. Engaging with initiatives like the “Penn Wharton Public Policy Initiative” will provide a platform to explore practical policy implications of economic theories. Moreover, participating in the “Wharton Social Impact Initiative” will allow me to explore sustainable business practices that can drive social change. I envision leveraging Wharton’s rigorous education, research initiatives, and practical platforms to develop and implement business practices and policies that mitigate wealth disparities, driving equitable economic growth.

Wharton’s prompt invites you to showcase your awareness of global issues, your perspective, and how you plan to utilize their offerings to explore and address these issues in the future . Ensure your response is informed, genuine, and demonstrates a clear pathway from the issue, through Wharton’s education, to future impact. Your response should reflect a well-thought-out understanding of the issue and Wharton’s offerings and articulate a clear vision of how you plan to bridge the two during and after your education at Wharton.

How Ken Got Into UPenn Wharton with Crimson

School of Engineering & Applied Science

“penn engineering prepares its students to become leaders in technology, by combining a strong foundation in the natural sciences and mathematics, exploration in the liberal arts, and depth of study in focused disciplinary majors. please share how you hope to explore your engineering interests at penn.”.

This prompt seeks to understand your passion for engineering, your career aspirations in the field , and how you plan to leverage Penn Engineering’s unique curriculum to further your interests and goals.

Articulate Your Engineering Interests

Clearly define what aspects of engineering fascinate you. Be explicit about your interests, whether it's a particular field (like biomedical engineering or computer science) or a specific topic (like artificial intelligence or sustainable design).

Understand Penn Engineering’s Offerings

Deeply explore Penn Engineering’s curriculum, resources, and extracurricular opportunities. Identify specific aspects that align with your interests, such as courses, professors, research labs, clubs, or initiatives.

Connect Interests, Education, and Future Aspirations

Demonstrate how Penn Engineering’s offerings will facilitate your exploration and advancement in your areas of interest. Connect the curriculum and opportunities at Penn Engineering directly to your career aspirations and explain how they will help you achieve your goals.

The intersection of robotics and healthcare has always fascinated me, especially in developing assistive technologies for individuals with mobility impairments. Penn Engineering, with its robust curriculum and the GRASP Laboratory, provides a perfect environment to delve deeper into this intersection. The “Robotics” major, offering courses like “Medical Robotics” and “Introduction to Robotics,” directly aligns with my interest in developing healthcare solutions through technology. Engaging with the GRASP Lab will provide hands-on experience in robotics research, while the “Penn Health-Tech” initiative will offer insights into healthcare needs and facilitate the translation of technical solutions into practical healthcare applications. I envision utilizing Penn Engineering’s interdisciplinary approach, combining technical knowledge with liberal arts exploration, to develop assistive technologies that are not only functionally effective but also accessible and user-friendly. By integrating technical expertise with an understanding of user needs and healthcare challenges, I aspire to create technologies that enhance mobility and independence for individuals with impairments, contributing to more inclusive and accessible healthcare solutions.

Penn Engineering’s prompt invites you to showcase your engineering interests and how you plan to explore them at Penn . Ensure your response demonstrates a clear understanding of your interests, how Penn Engineering’s offerings align with them, and how you plan to leverage these opportunities to further your career aspirations in engineering. Your response should reflect a genuine interest in a particular engineering domain and a well-thought-out plan for utilizing Penn Engineering’s resources to explore and advance in this domain.

Dual Degree & Specialized Program Prompts

“why are you interested in the digital media design (dmd) program at the university of pennsylvania”, - 400 to 650 words.

The DMD program at UPenn is a unique blend of engineering, computer graphics, fine arts, and design, aiming to prepare students for a plethora of careers in the digital media domain . Your essay should reflect a clear understanding of the program and a well-articulated reason for your interest.

Understand the DMD Program

Ensure you have a deep understanding of what the DMD program entails. Explore the curriculum, the faculty, the projects students work on, and the careers it leads to. Mention specific aspects of the program that appeal to you and are aligned with your career aspirations.

Articulate Your Interest in Digital Media Design

Clearly define your interest in digital media design. Discuss any experiences you have had in the field, such as projects, internships, or courses, and how they have shaped your interest and prepared you for the DMD program.

Connect Your Interests, the DMD Program, and Future Aspirations

Demonstrate a clear path that connects your past experiences, your interest in the DMD program, and your future career aspirations. Explain how the DMD program is the perfect next step for you and how it will help you achieve your career goals.

Highlight Your Fit and Contribution

Discuss how you will contribute to the DMD community and how your unique perspective and experiences will add value to it. Mention any specific ways in which you plan to get involved and contribute to ongoing projects or initiatives.

Ever since I designed my first mobile app as a high school sophomore, the amalgamation of design, technology, and user experience has captivated me. The Digital Media Design (DMD) program at UPenn stands out as a unique program that perfectly intertwines engineering, computer graphics, and design, offering a comprehensive approach to digital media that aligns seamlessly with my interests and aspirations. My journey in digital media design began with [Specific Project/Experience], where I explored [Specific Elements/Technologies]. This experience illuminated the profound impact of integrating aesthetic design with robust technology to create user-centric digital solutions. What excites me about the DMD program at UPenn is its interdisciplinary approach, combining courses like [Specific Course 1] and [Specific Course 2], which will equip me with the technical prowess and design thinking necessary to innovate in the digital media space. Moreover, the DMD program’s emphasis on collaborative projects and its connection with the [Specific Lab/Research Group] will provide a platform to apply theoretical knowledge to real-world problems, furthering my skills in practical applications of digital media design. I am particularly drawn to [Specific Project/Research] being conducted at [Specific Lab/Research Group] and am excited about the prospect of contributing to this work with my skills in [Specific Skills/Technologies]. In the future, I aspire to [Specific Career/Project Aspirations], creating digital solutions that [Specific Impact/Outcome]. The DMD program, with its robust curriculum, hands-on projects, and a vibrant community of innovators, is the ideal environment for me to hone my skills and work towards this aspiration. I am particularly excited about [Specific Element of DMD Program] and look forward to contributing to the DMD community through [Specific Contributions].

Your essay should demonstrate a clear understanding of the DMD program, a well-articulated path that connects your past experiences, your interest in the program, your future aspirations, and a genuine enthusiasm for the program and the field of digital media design. Ensure your response is specific, detailed, and authentic, reflecting a true interest and understanding of the DMD program and how it will help you achieve your career goals .

“The Huntsman Program supports the development of globally minded scholars who become engaged citizens, creative innovators, and ethical leaders in the public, private, and non-profit sectors in the United States and internationally. What draws you to a dual-degree program in business and international studies, and how would you use what you learn to contribute to a global issue where business and international affairs intersect?”

The Huntsman Program is a unique intersection of business and international studies, aiming to cultivate leaders who can navigate the global business landscape with a deep understanding of international affairs. Your essay should reflect a clear understanding of the program and a well-articulated vision for how you will leverage it to address global issues .

Understand the Huntsman Program

Ensure you have a deep understanding of the Huntsman Program, including its curriculum, philosophy, and outcomes. Mention specific aspects of the program that appeal to you and how they align with your career aspirations.

Articulate Your Interest in Business and International Studies

Clearly define your interest in the intersection of business and international studies. Discuss any experiences you have had in these fields, such as projects, internships, or courses, and how they have shaped your interest and prepared you for the Huntsman Program.

Identify a Global Issue

Choose a global issue where business and international affairs intersect and discuss why it is of importance to you. Ensure that the issue is something you are genuinely passionate about and that it has enough depth to explore in your essay.

Connect Your Interests, the Huntsman Program, and the Global Issue

Demonstrate a clear path that connects your past experiences, your interest in the Huntsman Program, and your future aspirations to address the global issue you have identified. Explain how the Huntsman Program is the perfect next step for you and how it will help you achieve your goals related to the global issue.

Discuss how you will contribute to the Huntsman community and how your unique perspective and experiences will add value to it. Mention any specific ways in which you plan to get involved and contribute to ongoing projects or initiatives.

Navigating through the complex tapestry of international markets and geopolitical climates has always fascinated me, particularly in the realm of sustainable business practices. The Huntsman Program, with its dual-degree in business and international studies, presents a unique and compelling pathway to delve deeper into this intersection, enabling scholars like me to devise solutions that are both economically viable and globally sustainable. My interest in this intersection was sparked by [Specific Project/Experience], where I witnessed firsthand the impact of [Specific Aspect of Business/International Affairs]. This experience underscored the necessity of intertwining robust business strategies with a nuanced understanding of international relations to forge sustainable global solutions. One pressing global issue that captivates my interest is [Specific Global Issue], particularly how [Specific Business and International Affairs Elements] intersect. This issue not only has profound implications for [Specific Outcomes/Challenges] but also presents opportunities to [Specific Solutions/Opportunities]. The Huntsman Program, with its rigorous curriculum encompassing [Specific Courses/Aspects], and its vibrant, globally-minded community, provides an unparalleled platform to explore this issue in depth. I am particularly drawn to [Specific Element of the Huntsman Program] and see it as a pivotal enabler in devising innovative solutions for [Specific Global Issue]. In the future, I aspire to [Specific Career/Project Aspirations], leveraging the knowledge and skills garnered from the Huntsman Program to [Specific Impact/Outcome]. I am excited about the prospect of collaborating with like-minded peers within the Huntsman community and contributing to [Specific Projects/Initiatives] during my time at UPenn.

Your essay should demonstrate a clear understanding of the Huntsman Program, a genuine interest in the intersection of business and international studies, and a well-articulated vision for how you will leverage the program to address a specific global issue. Ensure your response is specific, detailed, and authentic, reflecting a true interest and understanding of the program and the global issue you have chosen to discuss.

“The LSM program aims to provide students with a fundamental understanding of the life sciences and their management with an eye to identifying, advancing, and implementing innovations. What issues would you want to address using the understanding gained from such a program? Note that this essay should be distinct from your single degree essay.”

The LSM Program is designed to equip students with a robust understanding of both life sciences and management, enabling them to drive innovation in these fields. Your essay should reflect a clear understanding of the program and a well-articulated vision for how you will leverage it to address specific issues in the life sciences .

Understand the LSM Program

Ensure you have a thorough understanding of the LSM Program, including its curriculum, philosophy, and outcomes. Mention specific aspects of the program that appeal to you and how they align with your career aspirations.

Identify a Relevant Issue

Choose an issue in the life sciences that you are passionate about and discuss why it is of importance to you. Ensure that the issue is something you are genuinely interested in and that it has enough depth to explore in your essay.

Connect Your Interests, the LSM Program, and the Issue

Demonstrate a clear path that connects your past experiences, your interest in the LSM Program, and your future aspirations to address the issue you have identified. Explain how the LSM Program is the perfect next step for you and how it will help you achieve your goals related to the issue.

Discuss how you will contribute to the LSM community and how your unique perspective and experiences will add value to it. Mention any specific ways in which you plan to get involved and contribute to ongoing projects or initiatives.

The intersection of life sciences and management, particularly in the realm of biotechnological innovations, has always captivated my interest. The LSM Program, with its interdisciplinary approach, offers a unique platform to delve into this intersection, enabling scholars to drive innovations that can address pressing issues in the life sciences. My interest in this field was sparked by [Specific Project/Experience], where I witnessed the profound impact of [Specific Aspect of Life Sciences/Management]. This experience underscored the necessity of intertwining robust scientific research with strategic management to bring innovations from the lab to the market. One issue that I am particularly passionate about is [Specific Issue in Life Sciences], especially considering its implications for [Specific Outcomes/Challenges]. This issue presents opportunities to [Specific Solutions/Opportunities], which can be explored and implemented through the integration of life sciences and management. The LSM Program, with its robust curriculum encompassing [Specific Courses/Aspects], and its vibrant community of innovators, provides an unparalleled platform to explore this issue in depth. I am particularly drawn to [Specific Element of the LSM Program] and see it as a pivotal enabler in devising innovative solutions for [Specific Issue in Life Sciences]. In the future, I aspire to [Specific Career/Project Aspirations], leveraging the knowledge and skills garnered from the LSM Program to [Specific Impact/Outcome]. I am excited about the prospect of collaborating with the LSM community and contributing to [Specific Projects/Initiatives] during my time at UPenn.

Your essay should demonstrate a clear understanding of the LSM Program, a genuine interest in the intersection of life sciences and management, and a well-articulated vision for how you will leverage the program to address a specific issue in the life sciences. Ensure your response is specific, detailed, and authentic, reflecting a true interest and understanding of the program and the issue you have chosen to discuss.

M&T: The Jerome Fisher Program in Management and Technology: Prompt 1

“explain how you will use the m&t program to explore your interest in business, engineering, and the intersection of the two.”.

The Jerome Fisher Program in Management and Technology (M&T) is designed for students who have a keen interest in both engineering and business. Your essay should reflect a clear understanding of the program and a well-articulated vision for how you will leverage it to explore the intersection of business and engineering.

Understand the M&T Program

Ensure you have a thorough understanding of the M&T Program, including its curriculum, philosophy, and outcomes. Mention specific aspects of the program that appeal to you and how they align with your career aspirations.

Articulate Your Interest

Clearly articulate your interest in both business and engineering, providing examples from your past experiences that demonstrate your passion and aptitude in these areas.

Explore the Intersection

Discuss the intersection of business and engineering, providing specific examples of issues or opportunities that lie at this intersection that you are interested in exploring further through the M&T Program.

Connect Your Interests, the M&T Program, and Your Future Aspirations

Demonstrate a clear path that connects your past experiences, your interest in the M&T Program, and your future aspirations. Explain how the M&T Program is the perfect next step for you and how it will help you achieve your goals.

Discuss how you will contribute to the M&T community and how your unique perspective and experiences will add value to it. Mention any specific ways in which you plan to get involved and contribute to ongoing projects or initiatives.

Navigating through the realms of business and engineering has always been a focal point of my academic and extracurricular pursuits. My involvement in [Specific Project/Experience] illuminated the profound impact that can be achieved at the intersection of these two disciplines, particularly in the realm of [Specific Aspect of Business/Engineering]. A pressing issue that captivates my interest is [Specific Issue at the Intersection of Business and Engineering]. This issue presents a myriad of challenges and opportunities, such as [Specific Challenges/Opportunities], which can be navigated effectively through a robust understanding of both business and engineering. The M&T Program, with its interdisciplinary curriculum and vibrant community, provides an unparalleled platform to delve deeper into this intersection. I am particularly drawn to [Specific Element of the M&T Program] as it aligns perfectly with my interests and aspirations in [Specific Issue/Area]. In the future, I aspire to [Specific Career/Project Aspirations], leveraging the knowledge and skills garnered from the M&T Program to navigate the complex landscape of [Specific Issue/Area]. I am excited about the prospect of collaborating with the M&T community, contributing to [Specific Projects/Initiatives], and exploring innovative solutions at the intersection of business and engineering.

Your essay should demonstrate a clear understanding of the M&T Program, a genuine interest in both business and engineering, and a well-articulated vision for how you will leverage the program to explore specific issues or opportunities at the intersection of these two disciplines. Ensure your response is specific, detailed, and authentic, reflecting a true interest and understanding of the program and the issues you have chosen to discuss.

M&T: The Jerome Fisher Program in Management and Technology: Prompt 2

“describe a problem that you solved that showed leadership and creativity.”, - 250 words.

This prompt seeks to understand your problem-solving, leadership, and creative thinking skills through a specific example. Your response should succinctly narrate a situation, your actions, and the outcomes, showcasing your abilities in a compelling manner.

Identify a Relevant Problem

Choose a problem that allowed you to demonstrate both leadership and creativity in your solution. Ensure that the problem and your role in solving it are significant enough to showcase your abilities.

Structure Your Response

Given the word limit, structure your response to clearly outline the situation, your actions, and the outcomes. Ensure each aspect is clearly communicated and that your leadership and creativity are evident.

Highlight Your Leadership

Discuss how you took charge of the situation, the decisions you made, and how you motivated and coordinated with others. Highlight any specific challenges you overcame and how you navigated through them.

Showcase Your Creativity

Demonstrate how you thought outside the box to come up with innovative solutions. Highlight how your creative approach was instrumental in solving the problem.

Reflect on the Impact

Briefly discuss the impact of your solution, providing specific outcomes where possible. This could include the immediate outcomes as well as any longer-term impact that your solution may have had.

When our school’s annual event faced abrupt cancellation due to unforeseen circumstances, I spearheaded a team to transition it into a virtual format, ensuring continuity of a cherished tradition. The challenge lay in replicating the interactive and engaging aspects of the in-person event in a virtual environment. My creative approach involved leveraging various online platforms to create a multi-dimensional virtual experience. I coordinated with tech teams to integrate virtual reality (VR) environments, enabling participants to navigate through a simulated version of our school, attending different activities and sessions. Leadership was crucial in coordinating diverse teams, managing resources, and ensuring effective communication. I facilitated collaborations between the tech team, event organizers, and participants, ensuring a seamless transition to the virtual format. The event not only witnessed a record participation but also opened avenues for inclusive participation from international students, enhancing global engagement. This solution not only addressed the immediate problem but also introduced a new, inclusive format for future events.

Your response should succinctly and effectively communicate a problem, your leadership and creative approach to solving it, and the impact of your solution. Ensure that your abilities are clearly showcased through your actions and that the outcomes reflect positively on your problem-solving skills.

“Describe your interests in modern networked information systems and technologies, such as the internet, and their impact on society, whether in terms of economics, communication, or the creation of beneficial content for society. Feel free to draw on examples from your own experiences as a user, developer, or student of technology.”

This prompt invites you to explore your interests and experiences related to networked information systems and technologies, and their societal impact. It's an opportunity to showcase your understanding, passion, and vision regarding the intersection of technology and society.

Express Your Interest

Begin by articulating your interests in networked information systems and technologies. Discuss any specific aspects or technologies that particularly captivate you and why.

Highlight Personal Experiences

Share specific experiences as a user, developer, or student of technology that have shaped your interests and understanding. This could include projects you’ve worked on, courses you’ve taken, or personal experiences that have influenced your perspective.

Discuss Societal Impact

Explore the impact of networked information systems on society, considering various dimensions such as economics, communication, and content creation. Provide your insights into both the positive and negative implications, showcasing your nuanced understanding of the topic.

Incorporate Real-world Examples

Use real-world examples to illustrate your points, whether they are drawn from your personal experiences or from notable developments in the field. Ensure that these examples effectively support your discussion and showcase your knowledge and engagement with the topic.

Envision Future Possibilities

Consider discussing where you see these technologies heading in the future and any potential innovations or developments that you find particularly exciting or concerning. This is an opportunity to showcase your forward-thinking and visionary mindset.

Connect to the NETS Program

Towards the end, weave in how the NETS program at Penn aligns with your interests and how you envision leveraging the program to further explore and impact the field. Be specific about aspects of the program that resonate with you and how you see yourself contributing to and benefiting from it.

My fascination with networked information systems, particularly blockchain technology, stems from its revolutionary potential to democratize finance and enhance data security. My journey began with developing a decentralized voting system for our school elections, ensuring secure and transparent processes. This project not only fortified my technical skills but also illuminated the profound societal impact of secure and transparent networked systems. Blockchain, with its decentralized and immutable nature, has the potential to redefine economic structures, enhance data integrity, and democratize access to financial systems, especially in underbanked regions. However, it also poses challenges, such as energy consumption and regulatory dilemmas, reflecting the multifaceted impact of networked technologies on society. My experiences as a developer and user have underscored the importance of ethical considerations and user-centric design in developing technologies that are equitable, accessible, and beneficial to society. The NETS program, with its interdisciplinary approach and focus on the societal implications of networked systems, presents the ideal platform to deepen my understanding, engage in innovative projects, and develop solutions that positively impact society.

Your response should weave together your interests, experiences, understanding, and vision related to networked information systems and technologies, effectively showcasing your passion, expertise, and potential to contribute to the field. Ensure that your discussion is supported by specific examples and that your connection to the NETS program is clear and compelling.

“Discuss your interest in nursing and health care management. How might Penn's coordinated dual-degree program in nursing and business help you meet your goals?”

The NHCM program at Penn uniquely intertwines nursing and healthcare management, offering a comprehensive perspective on patient care and healthcare administration. Your essay should reflect your passion and rationale for intertwining these fields and how the NHCM program aligns with your aspirations.

Express Your Dual Interest

Begin by elucidating your interest in both nursing and healthcare management. Discuss why you believe these fields are interconnected and vital to your career aspirations. Ensure that your passion for both fields is evident and balanced throughout the essay.

Personal and Professional Motivations

Share experiences, observations, or learnings that have shaped your interest in nursing and healthcare management. This could include personal experiences, interactions with healthcare professionals, or insights gained through academic or extracurricular activities.

Highlight the Significance

Discuss the importance of integrating nursing with healthcare management, considering aspects like patient care, healthcare administration, policy-making, and healthcare innovation. Your insights into why a dual understanding is crucial in contemporary healthcare will underscore your informed interest.

Articulate Your Goals

Clearly define your short-term and long-term goals within the realms of nursing and healthcare management. Be specific about the impact you wish to make, the roles you aspire to undertake, and the advancements you wish to contribute to.

Connect to the NHCM Program

Detail how the NHCM program at Penn will facilitate your journey towards your goals. Discuss specific aspects of the program, such as courses, faculty, resources, or opportunities, that resonate with your interests and aspirations. Ensure that your connection to the program is specific, genuine, and well-researched.

Contribute and Gain

Reflect on what you will bring to the NHCM community and how you will leverage the program. Consider how your unique experiences and perspectives will enrich the community and how you plan to utilize the knowledge and experiences gained through the program in your future endeavors.

My journey through volunteering in a local hospital illuminated the intricate dance between empathetic patient care and meticulous healthcare management. Observing nurses who seamlessly integrated clinical expertise with administrative acumen highlighted the pivotal role of dual expertise in enhancing healthcare outcomes. My goal is to innovate healthcare delivery by intertwining clinical excellence with strategic management, ensuring equitable, efficient, and empathetic healthcare solutions. My experience developing a community health initiative for underprivileged neighborhoods underscored the importance of strategic management in amplifying the impact of nursing interventions. It is this symbiosis between nursing and management that I am eager to explore and deepen through the NHCM program. Penn’s NHCM program, with its rigorous curriculum, esteemed faculty, and myriad opportunities for practical application, presents the ideal platform to forge my path in healthcare. Courses like “Healthcare Management” and “Nursing in the Community” directly align with my interests, while the opportunities for internships and global experiences will facilitate practical application of theoretical knowledge. I bring with me a fervent passion for community healthcare, experiences in grassroots health initiatives, and a perspective shaped by on-ground realities. At NHCM, I aim to deepen my expertise, engage in collaborative learning, and contribute to the community, ultimately driving forward my vision for an integrated, innovative, and inclusive healthcare future.

Your essay should weave together your interests, experiences, goals, and connection to the NHCM program, showcasing a genuine, informed, and passionate commitment to nursing and healthcare management. Ensure that your essay is well-structured, specific, and reflective, effectively conveying your unique journey, vision, and fit for the NHCM program.

Seven-Year Bio-Dental Program: Prompt 1

“please list any predental or premedical experience. this experience can include but is not limited to observation in a private practice, dental clinic, or hospital setting; dental assisting; dental laboratory work; dental or medical research; etc. please include time allotted to each activity, dates of attendance, location, and a description of your experience. if you do not have any predental or premedical experience, please indicate what you have done or plan to do in order to explore dentistry as a career.”.

This prompt seeks a detailed account of your experiences and future plans related to the dental field. It’s crucial to provide a comprehensive, clear, and structured response.

For Those With Predental/Premedical Experience

Detail your experiences.

• Description: Clearly describe each experience, ensuring to highlight your role, responsibilities, and learnings.
• Time and Duration: Mention the total hours and the timeframe during which you gained this experience.
• Location: Specify where the experience took place.
• Reflection: Briefly reflect on what each experience taught you about the field and your career aspirations.

Variety and Depth

• Ensure to showcase a range of experiences, if possible, to demonstrate a well-rounded exploration of the field.
• Highlight experiences that had a significant impact on your decision to pursue dentistry.

Connect to Your Aspirations

• Subtly weave in how these experiences have shaped your understanding of dentistry and affirmed your career choice.

Example Entry

• Experience: Dental Assisting at [Clinic/Hospital Name]
• Duration: June 2022 - August 2022, 150 hours
• Location: [City, State]
• Description: Assisted with dental procedures, sterilized equipment, and engaged in patient care. This hands-on experience underscored the importance of precision and patient rapport in dental practice, solidifying my commitment to pursuing dentistry.

For Those Without Predental/Premedical Experience

Express genuine interest.

• Clearly articulate why you are interested in dentistry even without direct experience.

Alternative Experiences

• Discuss any experiences that, while not directly related to dentistry, have helped shape your career aspirations and transferable skills.

Future Plans

• Detail specific, actionable plans to gain experience and explore the dental field in the future.
• Mention any scheduled experiences, planned shadowing, or courses you intend to take.

Demonstrating Commitment

• Highlight how your actions, even without direct experience, showcase your commitment to pursuing dentistry.

While I have not yet gained direct predental experience, my engagement in [related experience] has honed my [specific skills] and affirmed my interest in healthcare. I have enrolled in a dental shadowing program scheduled for [month, year] and plan to volunteer at [specific location] to gain hands-on insight into dental practice. My commitment to exploring dentistry is underscored by [specific actions/qualities], and I am eager to deepen my understanding through continued experiences and education.

Ensure your response is clear, detailed, and reflective. Whether detailing past experiences or outlining future plans, showcase a genuine, informed commitment to exploring and contributing to the field of dentistry. Your experiences and plans should collectively convey your enthusiasm, understanding, and dedication towards a career in dentistry.

Seven-Year Bio-Dental Program: Prompt 2

“describe any activities which demonstrate your ability to work with your hands.”.

Dentistry is a profession that demands precision, dexterity, and adept manual skills. This prompt seeks to understand your foundational experiences that demonstrate your ability to work with your hands and potentially correlate to the manual skills required in dentistry.

Highlight Varied Experiences

• Artistic Pursuits: If you’ve engaged in painting, sculpture, or any other form of art, discuss how you’ve honed your hand-eye coordination and attention to detail.
• Craftsmanship: Activities like woodworking, sewing, or mechanics showcase your ability to manipulate tools and create detailed work.
• Musical Instruments: Playing instruments, especially those that require intricate hand movements like the piano or violin, can illustrate dexterity.
• Cooking or Baking: These activities often require precise measurements and manual skills, which can be relevant.

Detail Your Involvement

• Clearly describe your role and involvement in each activity.
• Mention the duration and level of commitment to each activity.

Reflect on Skills Developed

• Discuss specific skills developed through these activities, such as fine motor skills, precision, patience, and creativity.
• Reflect on how these skills might be transferable to a dental career.

Connect to Dentistry

• Subtly draw parallels between the manual skills utilized in these activities and those required in dentistry.
• If possible, relate it to any experiences or observations of dental practices.
• Activity: Pottery Crafting
• Duration: 3 years, weekly classes
• Description: Engaging in pottery has honed my manual dexterity and spatial awareness. Molding clay into detailed shapes and creating symmetrical, aesthetically pleasing pieces requires a steady hand and attention to detail. These skills, akin to those utilized in dental procedures, have not only enhanced my appreciation for meticulous handwork but also underscored the importance of precision and artistic understanding in creating functional, visually appealing structures.

Your response should provide a clear, detailed, and reflective account of your experiences that demonstrate manual dexterity and how these skills might translate into a dental career. Ensure to convey a genuine appreciation for activities that require hand skills and a thoughtful understanding of how these skills are relevant to dentistry. This will showcase your preparedness and intrinsic alignment with the skillset required in the dental profession.

Seven-Year Bio-Dental Program: Prompt 3

“what activities have you performed that demonstrate your ability to work effectively with people”.

Dentistry is not only about technical skills but also about interpersonal skills, as dentists work with diverse groups of people, including patients, staff, and other healthcare professionals. This prompt seeks to understand your experiences and skills in working with others.

Highlight Diverse Interactions

• Team Projects or Group Work: Discuss any collaborative projects or activities where you worked in a team, focusing on your role and contributions.
• Volunteer Work: Share experiences where you worked with people in a service capacity, such as volunteering at community centers, hospitals, or events.
• Leadership Roles: If you’ve held leadership positions in clubs, sports, or other organizations, discuss how you managed and worked with your team.
• Customer Service Roles: Jobs or roles in retail, restaurants, or any customer-facing position can showcase your ability to manage and interact with people effectively.

Demonstrate Key Skills

• Communication: Highlight instances where effective communication was key to success or resolving issues.
• Empathy: Share experiences that required understanding and empathizing with others’ perspectives or emotions.
• Conflict Resolution: Discuss any situations where you played a role in resolving conflicts or facilitating smooth interactions.
• Collaboration: Provide examples of how you worked cohesively with others to achieve common goals.

Reflect on Learnings and Growth

• Discuss what you learned from these experiences and how they shaped your interpersonal skills.
• Reflect on how these experiences have prepared you for interactions in a healthcare setting.

Relate to Dentistry

• Draw connections between the skills developed through these experiences and the interpersonal skills required in dentistry.
• Mention any interactions or observations in dental settings that further inspired or informed your understanding of patient-doctor interactions.
• Activity: Volunteering at a Local Community Center
• Duration: 2 years, bi-weekly involvement
• Description: My role involved organizing and facilitating community events, where I interacted with individuals from varied age groups and backgrounds. This experience enhanced my communication and organizational skills, as I coordinated with team members and engaged with community members to ensure successful events. I learned the importance of empathy and active listening, especially when interacting with elderly individuals who often shared personal stories and experiences. These skills are crucial in dentistry, where understanding and addressing patients’ concerns and anxieties is pivotal.

Your response should weave through your experiences, skills, reflections, and their relevance to dentistry in a cohesive manner. Ensure to provide specific examples and insights from your experiences, demonstrating a deep understanding of interpersonal skills and their application in a dental career. This will showcase your preparedness for the people-oriented aspects of a career in dentistry.

Seven-Year Bio-Dental Program: Prompt 4

“please explain your reasons for selecting dentistry. please include what interests you the most about dentistry as well as what interests you least.”.

Navigating through this prompt requires a balanced reflection on your passion and pragmatism towards a career in dentistry. It's essential to showcase genuine interest and understanding of the field while also acknowledging its challenges or less appealing aspects.

What Interests You Most

1. personal experiences:.

• Reflect on any personal experiences that drew you towards dentistry, such as dental visits, braces, etc.
• Discuss any interactions or observations with dentists that left a positive impact.

2. Impact and Service:

• Highlight the aspect of service and impact in dentistry — helping people improve their oral health, confidence, and quality of life.
• Mention the satisfaction derived from immediate results and direct impact in healthcare.

3. Interdisciplinary Nature:

• Discuss how dentistry combines various fields — healthcare, biology, engineering (prosthetics, orthodontics), and even art (aesthetics, restoration).

4. Patient Interaction:

• Mention the appeal of continuous patient interaction and building relationships over time.

5. Technological Advancements:

• Express interest in the evolving technology in dentistry, such as laser treatments, 3D printing, etc.

What Interests You Least

1. be honest but tactful:.

• Choose an aspect that is genuine but ensure it is not central to the profession.
• Avoid cliches like “there’s nothing I dislike” – authenticity is key.

2. Challenges in Patient Management:

• Discuss challenges like managing anxious or non-cooperative patients while maintaining empathy and professionalism.

3. Administrative Aspects:

• Mention the potential tedium of administrative tasks, paperwork, and management aspects of running a practice.

4. Continuous Learning Curve:

• Acknowledge the demanding aspect of continuous learning and adaptation due to evolving dental technologies and methods.

5. Ethical Dilemmas:

• Discuss navigating through ethical dilemmas, such as treatment refusals or non-adherence to advice.

I was drawn towards dentistry during my orthodontic treatment in high school, witnessing the profound impact it had on my confidence and oral health. The multifaceted nature of dentistry, intertwining healthcare, engineering, and aesthetic artistry, fascinates me. Particularly, the ability to alleviate pain, enhance aesthetics, and consequently, uplift an individual’s self-esteem and quality of life is profoundly impactful. However, the administrative aspects, such as managing paperwork and insurance claims, seem less engaging to me. While they are crucial for practice management, I find them to be a diversion from the core clinical and patient-care aspects that primarily draw me to dentistry. Nonetheless, I perceive them as a necessary component to facilitate the smooth functioning of a dental practice, ensuring that the clinical aspects can be executed effectively.

Your response should offer a well-rounded view of your perception of dentistry, reflecting both your passion and realistic understanding of the profession. Ensure to convey how the positives outweigh the negatives for you and how you are prepared to navigate through the less appealing aspects, showcasing a mature and informed perspective towards a career in dentistry.

“How do you envision your participation in the Vagelos Integrated Program in Energy Research (VIPER) furthering your interests in energy science and technology? Please include any past experiences (ex. academic, research, or extracurricular) that have led to your interest in the program. Additionally, please indicate why you are interested in pursuing dual degrees in science and engineering and which VIPER majors are most interesting to you at this time.”

Envisioning participation in viper, 1. interdisciplinary approach:.

• Highlight the appeal of VIPER’s interdisciplinary approach to energy research.
• Discuss how the blend of science and engineering will enable you to explore innovative solutions to energy challenges.

2. Research Opportunities:

• Mention specific research labs, projects, or professors in VIPER that align with your interests.
• Discuss how engaging in research from early on will deepen your understanding and skills in energy science.

3. Real-world Impact:

• Express your desire to contribute to tangible solutions for global energy challenges.
• Mention how VIPER’s focus on translating research into practical applications resonates with you.

Past Experiences

1. academic:.

• Mention any coursework or projects related to energy science, physics, chemistry, or engineering that piqued your interest in the field.

2. Research:

• Discuss any prior research experiences, especially those related to energy, and what you learned from them.

3. Extracurricular:

• Highlight participation in science clubs, competitions, or projects related to energy solutions.

Pursuing Dual Degrees

1. bridging theory and application:.

• Discuss how pursuing dual degrees will equip you with the theoretical knowledge and practical skills to innovate in energy solutions.

2. Comprehensive Understanding:

• Mention how the dual degrees will provide a comprehensive understanding of energy from both a scientific and engineering perspective.

3. Career Goals:

• Relate the dual degrees to your career aspirations in energy research, policy, or technology development.

VIPER Majors of Interest

1. specific interests:.

• Mention the VIPER majors that align with your interests and why they appeal to you.
• Be specific about the aspects of the major that excite you, such as particular courses or facets of the curriculum.

2. Future Applications:

• Discuss how the majors will equip you for your future career or research aspirations in the energy sector.

My fascination with energy science was ignited during a high school project on photovoltaic cells, where I explored the intricacies of converting sunlight into electricity. This interest was further fueled by my internship at [XYZ Lab], where I delved into research on enhancing the efficiency of solar panels using nanotechnology. VIPER, with its robust interdisciplinary approach, stands out as the epitome of energy research education, offering a unique blend of theoretical knowledge and practical application through its dual-degree program. Engaging in cutting-edge research under Dr. [ABC], particularly in [specific project or lab], aligns seamlessly with my aspirations to innovate in renewable energy technologies. The dual degrees in [specific majors] will not only deepen my understanding of energy science but also equip me with the engineering prowess to translate theories into tangible technologies. My goal is to contribute to developing scalable and sustainable energy solutions, and VIPER is the quintessential program to catalyze my journey in navigating the complexities and challenges of the energy landscape.

Ensure your essay reflects a genuine interest and understanding of energy science and the VIPER program. Connect your past experiences, current interests, and future aspirations cohesively, showcasing a clear pathway of how VIPER will be instrumental in furthering your career in energy research and technology.

General Guidelines for Answering UPenn's Supplemental Essay Questions

1. immerse yourself in upenn’s culture:.

• Understand UPenn’s Programs: Dive deep into the specifics of UPenn's programs, courses, and faculty to demonstrate a genuine interest and understanding of what the university offers.
• Align with UPenn’s Values: Ensure your responses resonate with UPenn’s ethos, particularly its emphasis on interdisciplinary learning, innovation, and impactful leadership.

2. Showcase Your Individuality:

• Highlight Unique Experiences: Your unique experiences, challenges, and perspectives are valuable—ensure they shine through in your essays.
• Your Contribution to UPenn: Clearly articulate how your uniqueness will contribute to the UPenn community and its diverse tapestry of cultures and ideas.

3. Articulate Clear Goals and Aspirations:

• Career and Academic Goals: Be clear about your academic and career aspirations and how UPenn’s specific offerings align with them.
• Interdisciplinary Interests: UPenn values interdisciplinary studies. Showcase your varied interests and how you plan to intertwine them during your time at UPenn.

4. Authenticity and Sincerity:

• Be Genuine: Authenticity in your responses will resonate more than trying to present an image you think the admissions committee wants to see.
• Reflect True Interests: Discuss programs, courses, and opportunities that genuinely excite you, not just those that seem impressive.

5. Precision and Clarity:

• Concise Writing: With stringent word limits, ensure your responses are concise, clear, and to the point without sacrificing depth or meaning.
• Prioritize Information: Choose the most impactful experiences and insights to share, ensuring they provide new information beyond your Common App essay.

6. Engage with Engaging Narratives:

• Storytelling: Weave your experiences and insights into a compelling narrative that provides a window into your world and aspirations.
• Relatable Experiences: Choose relatable stories and experiences and provide tangible evidence of your qualities and interests.

7. Flawless Presentation:

• Proofread Thoroughly: Ensure your essays are meticulously proofread and free from grammatical or syntactical errors.
• Seek Feedback: Obtain feedback from mentors, peers, or teachers to ensure clarity and impact in your writing.

8. Connect to the UPenn Experience:

• Visualize Your UPenn Journey: Ensure your essays provide a clear picture of how you envision your time at UPenn, both academically and personally.
• Community Involvement: Discuss how you plan to engage with and contribute to the UPenn community, both on and off campus.

9. Embrace the Opportunity:

• More Than an Application: View these essays as an opportunity to genuinely present who you are and articulate your fit and enthusiasm for UPenn.
• Showcase Your Journey: Use this platform to provide a holistic view of your journey, your aspirations, and why UPenn is the ideal place for you to realize them.

10. Stay Informed:

• Keep Updated: Ensure you’re aware of any recent developments, new programs, or initiatives at UPenn that might align with your interests and aspirations.
• Showcase Current Relevance: Relate your interests and experiences to current global or social contexts, showcasing your awareness and engagement with the world.

Navigating UPenn’s supplemental essays requires a blend of authenticity, clarity, and a deep understanding of what UPenn offers and values. By intertwining your unique journey, aspirations, and experiences with UPenn’s offerings and ethos, you can compellingly convey your fit and potential contributions to the UPenn community.

For further insights and examples, exploring the U Penn essay examples might provide additional perspectives on crafting standout applications.

Final Thoughts

Embarking on your journey towards the University of Pennsylvania is about more than academic achievements; it's about crafting a narrative that intertwines your unique journey, aspirations, and potential contributions with UPenn’s rich legacy and vibrant community. Your supplemental essays provide a pivotal platform to showcase your character, aspirations, and the distinctive value you would bring to the UPenn community.

Every UPenn aspirant brings a unique story and perspective. This is your opportunity to eloquently articulate yours, ensuring it resonates with UPenn’s ethos and offerings. Approach your essays with authenticity, depth, and a palpable passion for your narrative and future aspirations.

If you find yourself questioning whether your essay genuinely encapsulates your essence or stands out amidst a sea of applications, our essay review service is here to assist you. Our seasoned experts will provide comprehensive reviews and feedback, ensuring your essay resonates powerfully with UPenn’s admissions officers. For additional insights and inspiration, our ebook , featuring essays from students who secured spots at top-tier institutions, can be a valuable resource. Moreover, our compilation of successful UPenn essay examples will offer invaluable perspectives and inspiration.

For those embarking on their college application journey, consider scheduling a free consultation with our experienced college counselors. We are committed to assisting you in crafting an application that enhances your chances of becoming a part of UPenn’s vibrant community. Your dream of joining the ranks of UPenn’s Quakers is within reach, and we are here to support you at every step of your journey.

What Makes Crimson Different

Key Resources & Further Reading

• Everything you need to know about US Application Supplemental Essays
• Acing your College Application Essay: 5 Expert Tips to Make it Stand Out from the Rest
• How to Tackle Every Type of Supplemental Essay
• 2023-24 Common App Essay Prompts
• What are the Most Unusual US College Supplemental Essay Prompts?

More Articles

Everything you need to know about the supplemental essays.

Big Changes to the UCAS Personal Statement: What You Need to Know

10 Great Common App Essay Examples From Accepted Students

The Common App is Open! Get expert guidance to complete your application with the College Application Booster​®.

Command Education Guide

How to write the university of pennsylvania essays, updated for 2023-2024.

Write a short thank-you note to someone you have not yet thanked and would like to acknowledge. (We encourage you to share this note with that person, if possible, and reflect on the experience!) (150-200 words)

Explanation:

Identify a meaningful person: Start by thinking about who you want to thank. This could be anyone from a teacher who has influenced your academic career to a family member who has supported you, a friend who has been there for you during challenging times, or even someone you barely know but who has unexpectedly helped you or made a significant impact on your life. This is a good opportunity to give the admissions committee some insight into the meaningful relationships in your life.

Be Personal and Sincere: The note should be written from the heart. Authenticity is essential. Ensure that the essay communicates your gratitude sincerely and explains clearly the reasons behind your acknowledgment. Highlighting how the relationship has affected you positively is a good way to demonstrate maturity and introspection.

Reflect on the experience: After writing your thank-you note, spend a few lines reflecting on the experience. What has it taught you? How has it affected your perspective or actions? Have you learned something about gratitude, empathy, or connection? Try to tie this reflection back to your personal growth and development.

Stay within the word limit: Stick to 150-200 words, and ensure every word adds value to your message. The thank-you note should be concise, clear, and impactful.

Polish your writing: Even though this prompt may seem less formal than others, you still need to write professionally and coherently. Proofread your work for grammar and spelling mistakes.

Dear Grandma,

I wanted to express my heartfelt thanks for the example you have set for me. Your work organizing voiceless residents of your retirement community towards productive action in the family council is the roadmap for bettering my community. Your committed work paved a path that I will always follow.

You’ve taught me the essence of advocacy, not just through your unquestioning support of me, but by showing what it means to work for the community. I hope to handle the obstacles of life with the grace, resilience, and unwavering conviction that you embody every day.

In the 1940’s, when you were not much older than I am now, you decided to dedicate your young adulthood to educating Japanese children in the face of internment and unimaginable bigotry. Your example showed me that—then as now—people young and old are capable of affecting immense change. Your courage is what I aspire to.

In our long rambling conversations about my world and yours, I’ve learned that empathy, gratitude, and connection are not just virtues, but guiding principles. Thank you for being an extraordinary example of strength and for teaching me to stand up for what is right.

Your loving grandson, Cole

How will you explore community at Penn? Consider how Penn will help shape your perspective, and how your experiences and perspective will help shape Penn. (150-200 words)

Research the Penn Community: Penn offers a lot of unique opportunities and programs—from academic and research communities to cultural and interest-based groups. Many of these groups are pre-professional and provide unparalleled opportunities for experiential learning. Show that you’ve done your homework by mentioning specific aspects of the Penn community that align with your interests and values.

Clarify your interests and goals: Clearly articulate what you are interested in and how you plan to pursue these interests at Penn. This might be specific courses, extracurricular activities, research opportunities, clubs, or community service projects. It is crucial that your writing is as specific as possible. Broad generalities will not fly in this essay.

Demonstrate Contribution: Universities value students who not only take advantage of opportunities but also contribute to the campus community. Show how your unique experiences and perspectives will enrich the Penn community. It could be a unique cultural background, personal experiences, skills, or interests you will bring to the table.

Discuss the impact of Penn on your perspective: Address how being a part of the Penn community would shape your world view and future career aspirations. Demonstrate not only how you would contribute to the Penn community, but how the Penn community will contribute to your academic, personal, and intellectual growth.

Since the start of my Senior year, I have begun developing youth engagement and outreach strategies to ensure students are involved in the campaign for California education chief. In democracy, I believe that participation in the civic process is an individual’s primary responsibility. Justice Louis Brandeis put it best when he said: “The most important [political] office, and the one which all of us can and should fill, is that of private citizen.”

As a student, I see my civic responsibility as far greater. Unable to participate through the ballot box, my ideas must stand as testimony to my citizenship. During high school, I have found civic engagement to be transformative in my life.

By engaging in the myriad opportunities for civic engagement at Penn, including the Netter Center and the University Assisted Community Schools program, I hope to engage Philadelphia students in Penn’s push for civic engagement. I want to use my time at the ‘civic Ivy’ to create structures for engagement in school governance and connect students to Penn education policy researchers. Only at Penn will I find a university community that is devoted to the civic engagement that has transformed my life.

College of Arts and Sciences Specific Prompt:

The flexible structure of The College of Arts and Sciences’ curriculum is designed to inspire exploration, foster connections, and help you create a path of study through general education courses and a major. What are you curious about and how would you take advantage of opportunities in the arts and sciences? (150-200 words)

Politics became my passion at nine years old when I began staying up late watching The West Wing with my parents. Much of the jargon flew over my head, but I learned that government has the power to bring people together to work for the common good.

With Penn’s unique opportunities for experiential learning in education policy and government, the College of Arts and Sciences is the perfect environment for me to explore the roles of racism, sexism, religion, privilege and power in the American experience. Through programs such as Penn in Washington and the Penn Program for Public Service Summer Internship, I want to perfect my role in the office of private citizen. In the process, I know I will better understand how I can be a part of social and political change.

With Penn’s stimulating curriculum and unique approach to learning, I hope to immerse myself in the passion for Government that I have had since I was nine years old. Whether I pursue a career in public policy, political office, the law, or even film and television, I know that Political Science at Penn will give me the platform necessary to be a true leader.

Wharton Specific prompt:

Wharton prepares its students to make an impact by applying business methods and economic theory to real-world problems, including economic, political, and social issues. Please reflect on a current issue of importance to you and share how you hope a Wharton education would help you to explore it. (150-200 words)

School of Engineering and Applied Sciences Specific Prompt:

Penn Engineering prepares its students to become leaders in technology, by combining a strong foundation in the natural sciences and mathematics, exploration in the liberal arts, and depth of study in focused disciplinary majors. Please share how you hope to explore your engineering interests at Penn. (150-200 words)

Dual degree programs (such as M&T or the Huntsman program) also have additional program specific essays.

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15 UPenn Essay Samples That Worked

Updated for the 2024-2025 admissions cycle.

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The University of Pennsylvania, also known as UPenn, is an Ivy League university that provides students from all over the world with a world-class education. With over 4,700 courses, 150 majors, and 500 clubs and organizations, there is truly something for everyone. The school offers over eight specialized programs. This includes the Bio-Dent Seven Year Bio-Dental Program, which allows students to earn an undergraduate degree in biology and a DMD degree from the school of dentistry in only seven years. Undergraduate students can also take classes at Wharton, which is among the most prestigious business schools in the world. Ultimately, the University of Pennsylvania is an outstanding choice for students to create their future, with exceptional academics, cultural events, landmark buildings, and a bustling campus life.

Unique traditions at UPenn

1. The Naked Quad Run: Every year on the night before the last exam, Penn students take off all their clothes except for shoes and sprint around the school's quad. The tradition began in 1997 as a way to celebrunte the end of the semester in a fun and rally way. 2. The Button Game: Penn's button game is an indoor scavenger hunt that takes place during the Spring semester. The game includes making designs out of buttons and other clues located around campus. 3. Senior Tree Planting: For the class of 1996 and beyond, Penn seniors are invited to plant a tree in West Philadelphia in a ceremony. The tree planting ceremony symbolizes the students' commitment to Penn and to the community. 4. The Red Cross Fire Companies: Penn's oldest student-run organizations date back to the 1800s when students formed the Fire Companies. The Fire Companies fought small fires on campus, performed drills to maintain their skill and performed service activities for the local community. 5. Homecoming Heroes: Penn celebrates their student and alumni achievements by designating a select group of Homecoming Heroes. The Heroes were chosen for their exceptional contributions to the University and their dedication to Penn's mission.

Programs at UPenn

1. Wharton Global Ambassadors: A student-run organization that works to establish relationships with like-minded business professionals from all over the world. 2. Penn Community Garden: An organization dedicated to providing fresh produce to individuals and families in need in the nearby community. 3. Penn Program for Public Service: An organization providing a platform for interdisciplinary service projects that promotes meaningful community engagement. 4. Engineering Without Borders: A student-run organization that links engineering technology and knowledge to empower people in developing countries. 5. PennSocial Justice: A student-led organization fostering social activism to create a just and sustainable world.

At a glance…

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Real Essays from UPenn Admits

Prompt: considering the specific undergraduate school you have selected, describe how you intend to explore your academic and intellectual interests at the university of pennsylvania..

The intersection between environmental science and debate are the two subjects I’ve realized I aspire to study, and Penn can effectively allow me to study their interdisciplinary connections.

As a student of Penn’s College of Arts and Sciences, I’ll seek to explore these subjects further with the people who piqued my curiosity in the first place. For example, Professor Kok-Chor Tan wrote a paper on the relationship between justice and wildlife protection, which prompted my interest in the intersections of philosophy and our ecosystem. I’d take his Philosophy of Law course (PHIL-1450) to learn about distributive justice in law, so I can strengthen my capabilities to campaign for eco-policies in the Philadelphia area, like the “Keep Philly Green & Water Clean” initiative.

Additionally, I’d also want to pursue research with professors like Cary Coglianese, who wrote a paper on policymakers’ failing responses to climate change, which I cited in a debate on the need for radical change in environmental legislation. The opportunity to learn both within the classroom and collaborate with Penn’s exceptional faculty makes me eager to become a Quaker.

Essay by Michael

Music producer and Philosophy connoisseur @ Penn

Prompt: Write a short thank-you note to someone you have not yet thanked and would like to acknowledge. (We encourage you to share this note with that person, if possible, and reflect on the experience!) (150-200 words)

Dear [Name Redacted], When I loudly greeted you on the first day of high school, I hadn’t noticed that you were busy. Yet, you didn’t seem to mind. You raised your head from that huge pile of paperwork just to tell me I’d make a great singer. You encouraged me to try out for [Choir] when the only singing I’d done so far was in the shower. I remember how you reassured me as I trembled during try-outs, and how you shared my joy when I found out I got in. Thanks to you, I found voice and community in music. Thank you for bearing with my voice cracks and inexperience, and helping me get over them. Thank you for dedicating your weekends and after-school hours to preparing us for our performances. Even during a global pandemic, you’ve organized online concerts and made sure our community persisted. You have been the best teacher, maestro, and mentor I could’ve asked for. Wherever I end up, I know that I will be pursuing vocal music, and benefiting from the confidence and multicultural perspective you’ve helped me gain. Thank you for your guidance and support. Sincerely,

Essay by KK

International CS + Linguistics Major @ Stanford | 400K in Scholarships | Book Session For Unlimited Essay Help, Common App Editing, Vital Tips For Getting Into Stanford & Yale!

Prompt: How will you explore community at Penn? Consider how Penn will help shape your perspective and identity, and how your identity and perspective will help shape Penn. (150-200 words)

Growing up in a racially homogenous society has both its challenges and benefits. Despite being born in the US, I am Japanese at heart, yet face a lack of acceptance in my community. Discrimination is a daily reality. On crowded trains, I find an empty seat next to me, bearing the name gaijin-seat (foreigner seat). Locals referred to me as gaijin rather than the polite form — gaikokujin. Simultaneously, I’ve encountered a unique form of admiration since childhood, with people fixating on my physical attributes: eyelashes, cheekbones, head shape. 

My first-hand experience of both subtle discrimination and excessive admiration has profoundly shaped my perspective on social issues. It serves as a driving force behind my research project on the gender wage gap in South Korea, aiming to comprehend implicit bias and its pervasive societal impact. These experiences have granted me profound insights into the complexities surrounding discrimination and bias, motivating me to contribute to mitigating their effects and fostering inclusivity. I look forward to contributing to Penn’s community, drawing upon my unique experience, and actively participating in organizations such as SIC, The Social Impact Consulting Group, to further the goal of creating an inclusive society, regardless of background or appearance.

Essay by Anastasia P.

Pre-Law Track Freshman @ Harvard University

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Someone with the same interests, stats, and background as you

Supplementary Materials

All the information that we feel is crucial in making an admission decision is included within our required documents. Most students who apply to Penn do not submit any supplemental materials. However, some applicants may feel that their application is missing key contextual information representing who they are and decide to submit supplemental materials such as another recommendation letter, an expanded resume, a research abstract, or an art or music sample.  

While there are rare instances where additional information may benefit an application, we ask that you are selective and discerning about submitting any supplementary material. We cannot guarantee that all supplementary materials submitted will be reviewed during the application process. In most cases, too many extra documents can take away from the strength of an application. In short, keep it simple!  

Below are guidelines to follow when submitting anything that is outside of the required documents.    

Please note that materials outside of those listed below will not be considered.  

Penn does allow for one additional supplemental recommendation letter beyond the three required. Please be selective when deciding whether you need to request this supplemental recommendation letter, as an additional letter is meant as an opportunity to ensure equity in our process for students who may have unique circumstances that require more context.   

If you decide to submit this letter, please be sure to choose someone who knows you personally and whose perspective would add information not captured elsewhere in your application. This person may be a supervisor at work, mentor, coach, arts or music instructor, spiritual leader, or cultural leader. Letters from family members and close family friends typically do not provide information that is helpful for our evaluation process.   

If you choose to submit an optional additional letter of recommendation, please submit it directly through the Coalition or Common App.  

Students who have completed notable academic research should use the activities section or additional information sections of the application to convey these achievements.  

If, however, there is a brief abstract or explanation of your work that you could not include in other required parts of the application, you may submit this document as a supplementary material through your Penn Applicant Portal. You will be able to access your Penn Applicant Portal after you submit the Coalition or Common App and the Penn Supplement.  

Students with exceptional and recognized talents in visual arts, performing arts, or music, should use the activities section or additional information sections of the application to convey these achievements.   

If, however, there are samples of your work that you could not include in other required parts of the application, you may upload them to an external host site—like a personal website, YouTube, or SoundCloud—and then submit a document with any URLs/links as a supplementary material through your Penn Applicant Portal. You will be able to access your Penn Applicant Portal after you submit the Coalition or Common App and the Penn Supplement.  

Art or Music samples may be examined by faculty members from a relevant department, but there is no guarantee that an expert will be able to evaluate your materials. 

Portfolios will only be reviewed in three instances:  

• All forms of media are welcomed. Please limit your selection to 5-12 pieces, or a maximum of 5 minutes of video.   
• A member of the DMD faculty will examine your portfolio materials and provide a summary evaluation for the Admissions Committee.   
• If you decide to submit a portfolio, please include a minimum of ten different works.   
• Uploading an artist’s statement of at least 300 words is strongly encouraged.   
• Transfer students applying to enroll as second-year students in Architecture are required to submit a portfolio. There is no specific number of submissions that must be included. Third-year transfers are ineligible to apply to the Architecture major.  

Learn more about undergraduate programs available in the arts, design, and architecture.  

File Sizes and Types for Portfolios

We support media files as large as 5GB, but please be advised that larger files will take longer to upload from your internet connection and may stall if you are on a wireless connection or one that cannot sustain a connection uninterrupted. Uploaded documents may contain no more than 75 pages. We support the following file formats:  

• Video: .3g2, .3gp, . avi , .m2v, .m4v, . mkv , .mov, .mpeg, .mpg, .mp4, . mxf , . webm , . wmv  
• Audio: . aac , .m4a, . mka , .mp3, . oga , . ogg , .wav  
• Slide: .bmp, .gif, .jpg, .jpeg, . png , . tif , .tiff  
• Document: .doc, .docx, . odg , . odp , . odt , .pdf, .ppt, .pptx, .rtf, . wpd  
• Upload Link or URL  

How to Get Into University of Pennsylvania (UPenn) Guide

How to get into upenn—general information.

The University of Pennsylvania is a private Ivy League research university located in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. It was founded in 1740 as the College of Philadelphia. The student body in the university at large is nearly 30,000, and the undergraduate population is just over 10,000.

What we’ll cover in this How to Get Into UPenn guide:

• UPenn average GPA scores
• Optimal UPenn SAT scores
• UPenn application deadline
• Details on the UPenn early decision acceptance rate
• Preparing for a UPenn interview
• UPenn supplemental essays, and more.

When thinking about how to get into UPenn, you should ensure each portion of your application is competitive—your GPA, UPenn SAT scores, UPenn supplemental essays, and more. This means preparing your application materials well before the UPenn application deadline. 

More broadly, you should prepare for the UPenn application deadline by ensuring your grades align with the UPenn average GPA. You should also strive for high UPenn SAT scores. This will improve your chances of admission, though we will also discuss how to apply to UPenn with grades lower than the UPenn average GPA. 

Figuring out how to get into UPenn takes strategy. We can help. CollegeAdvisor.com’s network of 300+ Admissions Experts (and former admissions officers) includes UPenn graduates. Want to maximize your UPenn admissions odds?  Create your free account or schedule a free advising consultation by calling (844) 343-6272. 

How hard is it to get into University of Pennsylvania?

When wondering how to get into UPenn, selectivity is a big question. UPenn is a highly competitive school, with an undergraduate acceptance rate of 5.9% for the class of 2025. The UPenn Early Decision acceptance rate for the class of 2025 was 14.9%. 

In short, UPenn is a highly selective school. So, there is no one answer to how to get into UPenn. It will be a “reach” school for any applicant, but with a solid application, you can be a strong contender. In this guide, we will break down how to get into UPenn with actionable goals you can complete well before the UPenn application deadline. 

What GPA for University of Pennsylvania?

In considering how to get into UPenn, be sure to review the UPenn average GPA. The UPenn average GPA is 3.9. This makes the school highly competitive, with a low UPenn Early Decision acceptance rate and regular decision acceptance rate as well. The UPenn admissions website says high school performance is “the single most important factor in the student selection process.” 

In order to meet the UPenn average GPA, select rigorous yet appropriate high school courses. For instance, if you have taken standard math courses throughout school, senior year may not be the time to insist on taking AP Calculus BC. However, excelling in challenging classes is the best way to show academic strength. It’s all about finding the right balance in your course schedule.  

Beyond grades

If you are a high school junior or senior wondering how to get into UPenn and realizing you can’t meet the UPenn average GPA by the UPenn application deadline, don’t worry. Remember that your grades are just one part of your application. Ultimately, your GPA shows UPenn admissions how you might handle their course load. If you can supplement a GPA lower than the UPenn average GPA with strong UPenn SAT scores, extracurriculars, and UPenn supplemental essays, you can still submit a strong application. To put your best foot forward, start strategizing before the UPenn application deadline.

What does the University of Pennsylvania application look like?

When trying to figure out how to get into UPenn as you look toward the UPenn application deadline, you’ll want to know exactly what is expected of you. This is especially true given the low UPenn Early Decision acceptance rate and lower RD acceptance rate.

You can access the UPenn application through the CommonApp or the Coalition Application. If you are a QuestBridge scholar, you can also apply to UPenn via the QuestBridge application. 

In addition to the Common App or Coalition Application , UPenn admissions also requires:

• UPenn supplemental essays
• Official high school transcript 
• School report
• Letters of recommendation (3)
• Early Decision agreement (if applicable)
• Mid-year report
• Final report (if matriculating)

Of all these requirements, the UPenn supplemental essays will most demand your attention. Make sure your school sends the rest of the forms listed above to UPenn admissions by the UPenn application deadline. 

UPenn requires two additional UPenn supplemental essays in addition to the Common App or Coalition Application essay. To learn more about how to approach the UPenn supplemental essays, read our article, “University of Pennsylvania (UPenn) Supplemental Essays Guide: 2021-2022.”

The UPenn undergraduate application also includes optional application materials, which we highly recommend submitting by the UPenn application deadline if they apply to you. These are:

• UPenn SAT scores or ACT scores
• UPenn interview
• Fine arts supplement 
• Additional letter of recommendation (1)
• Financial aid materials

UPenn waived its requirement of UPenn SAT scores or ACT scores for the 2021-22 application cycle in light of COVID-19. However, these policies may change. So, keep your eye on the UPenn SAT scores and ACT scores requirement. 

Test scores can help

Sending UPenn SAT scores or ACT scores is technically optional. However, when looking at how to get into UPenn, know that testing is a great way to boost your application. This is particularly true if your GPA is lower than the UPenn average GPA. Take the PSAT your sophomore year for a starting score. Then, study throughout your sophomore and junior year. This will give you time to test and retest if necessary to receive high UPenn SAT test scores before the UPenn application deadline.

For tips on testing, check out our article, “To Take or Not to Take: Standardized Tests in a Test-Optional Environment.”

In the same vein, we highly recommend taking advantage of the UPenn interview if you are offered one. This is a great chance to breathe life into your application and meet a UPenn alumnus. 

For the fine arts supplement and additional letter of recommendation, only submit these if they apply to you and will add to your application. If you have a strong art portfolio, share this with UPenn admissions. With regard to the extra letter of recommendation, the UPenn admissions site asks that you “only submit additional letters from people who know you personally and whose perspective would add information not captured elsewhere in your application.”

What extracurriculars does University of Pennsylvania like?

If you are trying to figure out how to get into UPenn, you are likely curious about extracurriculars. There is no formula when it comes to choosing extracurriculars. Instead, simply commit to extracurriculars you love, not extracurriculars you think UPenn will love. UPenn can tell the difference between extracurriculars that match your interests and extracurriculars you chose just to boost your resume. 

Do not try to become the student body president, debate team captain, and editor-in-chief of the school paper— unless all of those activities truly reflect your passions that come through in other parts of your application . Dedication to a few extracurriculars you love will show more character and discipline than a long list of extracurriculars not connected to your interests. The answer to how to get into UPenn lies in authenticity —reflecting your unique passions will set you apart. 

What is the acceptance rate for University of Pennsylvania?

If you are wondering how to get into UPenn, there is probably one statistic you care most about—the UPenn Early Decision acceptance rate and overall acceptance rate. The acceptance rate for UPenn undergraduate admissions is 5.9%, and the UPenn Early Decision acceptance rate was 14.9% for the class of 2025. Any acceptance rate under or around 10% makes a university highly selective. This means most accepted students have strong grades that match the UPenn average GPA.

When thinking about how to get into UPenn, you’ll have to choose whether to apply to UPenn Early Decision or regular decision. Do not be swayed by the UPenn Early Decision acceptance rate versus the overall acceptance rate. Instead, think about whether UPenn is truly your dream school. If you have been thinking of nothing but UPenn throughout your application process and would be happy to immediately accept their offer, then apply ED.

Want to learn more about acceptance rates? Check out our expert  guide .

On applying early

You should not apply ED to show demonstrated interest (DI). That is not the answer to how to get into UPenn. UPenn does not take DI into account, so there is no reason to apply ED if UPenn is not your top choice. 

Now, whether you are looking at the UPenn Early Decision acceptance rate or overall acceptance rate, you may be wondering—what does that number really mean in terms of how to get into UPenn? Simply put, the UPenn Early Decision acceptance rate and overall acceptance rate represent the number of students admitted out of the total number of applicants.

The UPenn Early Decision acceptance rate and overall acceptance rate can help show how selective UPenn is and where it fits on your college list in terms of “reach” versus “safety” schools. However, you shouldn’t focus on it too much. At the end of the day, there will always be unknown admissions factors. So, simply give it your best shot, and remember that your admissions decision does not reflect your worth.

Does University of Pennsylvania require interviews?

When wondering how to get into UPenn, the question of interviews often comes up. UPenn does not require interviews, nor do they offer them to all applicants, since UPenn interviews depend on alumni availability. However, the UPenn admissions site does say 90% of applicants are offered a UPenn interview, so you should prepare to interview for UPenn. 

UPenn also states, “If you receive an invitation for an alumni interview, we strongly encourage you to make time for the opportunity. If you have to decline the interview, please respond to your interviewer explaining why you can’t participate in the conversation.” In other words—do not turn down this opportunity unless you have a very strong reason to do so. 

We highly recommend you visit the UPenn admissions site to prepare for your UPenn interview. UPenn has a particularly thorough page that details what to expect and courteous common practice. 

General guidelines to keep in mind for your UPenn interview:

• Say yes! It is highly recommended to accept this invitation.
• Lean into the spontaneity. Do not research your UPenn interviewer or prepare a list of your accolades to recite. Let a natural conversation about your passions and personal story arise. 
• Dress appropriately. The UPenn admissions site suggests dressing as you would for a school presentation or picture. Ultimately, you should be comfortable. This will help you just focus on the conversation between you and your UPenn interviewer.
• Review the list of possible questions your UPenn interviewer may ask on the UPenn website.
• Prepare your own list of questions for the UPenn interviewer, and consider including the questions provided on the UPenn website.
• Write a quick thank-you note post-interview. 
• Review the “Penn Alumni Interview Program Principles of Good Practice” page, as well as the “Advice on College Interviews from Penn Admissions” video.
• Have fun! This is your chance to let your personality shine through and add dimension to your application. 

Tips to write the University of Pennsylvania essays?

Another crucial part of how to get into UPenn lies in the UPenn supplemental essays. This is your opportunity to let your voice shine through in your application. Though writing two UPenn supplemental essays may seem like a tall task, we have broken it down for you into manageable action points.

Check out CollegeAdvisor’s “University of Pennsylvania (UPenn) Supplemental Essays Guide: 2021-2022” for more details.

How does University of Pennsylvania review applications? 

When considering how to get into UPenn, you might wonder about the application review process. Luckily, UPenn sheds light on the process in the Penn Admissions YouTube video, “Advice on Navigating the College Admissions Process.” Here, UPenn details each aspect of the “comprehensive whole person review” they conduct for each applicant. UPenn admissions breaks down this review into four categories:

• Activities 
• Essays 
• Interviews 

This UPenn Admissions video goes further into what UPenn looks for within each of these categories. Academics is UPenn’s first priority, so pay attention to the UPenn average GPA and strongly consider submitting UPenn SAT scores. Be sure to review this admissions resource page when preparing your materials before the UPenn application deadline. 

Will University of Pennsylvania look at my social media? 

When researching how to get into UPenn, many applicants worry about their social media presence. But not to worry— UPenn will not be scoping out your social media , according to Dean of Admissions Eric Furda. With tens of thousands of applications received each year, it is simply not possible. So, no need to delete your accounts or change your usernames when trying to figure out how to get into UPenn. UPenn will only review the application materials you send in. 

Is University of Pennsylvania a good school for me?

This is a very important question and one that should precede the question of how to get into UPenn. Often, applicants get wrapped up in wondering if admissions will decide they are right for a school without stopping to consider whether that school is right for them.

How to determine whether UPenn is right for you:

• Visit the UPenn “About” page, and schedule a campus tour or take a virtual one. This will help you determine whether your values align with UPenn and whether you can see yourself attending. Do you like the location? The class sizes? The focus on social-minded action, innovation, and research?
• Research UPenn’s programs and majors to see if they match your interests. This will help you to concretely answer, “Why UPenn?” You will also need to answer this question in your UPenn supplemental essays and your UPenn interview. 
• Look to see if UPenn offers any programs, clubs, or activities outside of your comfort zone that you can see yourself trying for the first time. This is a great way to grow as a learner. It will also help you write your UPenn supplemental essays. 

Regular or Early Decision?

If it turns out that UPenn is a good school for you, the next question to consider is whether to apply ED or RD. If UPenn is your absolute first choice and you do not want to even consider attending another school, then apply ED. But, if you are curious about other universities and are not ready to commit solely to UPenn, that’s okay, too! Apply RD. UPenn does not consider demonstrated interest in its application review process, so you won’t be penalized for applying RD. Your admissions odds also won’t necessarily improve if you apply ED.

Additional tips to get into University of Pennsylvania:

Begin building a strong academic portfolio at the start of your high school career. Then, start preparing your UPenn SAT scores or ACT scores by your junior year. Finally, collect your application materials the summer before your application is due, well before the UPenn application deadline.

Constructive a narrative

What story does your application tell? Make sure this story runs through your application. If you are an artist with a passion for social change, highlight the classes, extracurriculars, and personal stories that reflect these interests. Make it easy for UPenn admissions to picture who you are and how you might fit into UPenn student life.

Ask for help

Have someone you trust review your materials well before the UPenn application deadline. Ask them to look at your application well before the UPenn application deadline so they can catch any last-minute errors.

Though applying to a competitive school like UPenn can seem overwhelming, remember that at the end of the day you are taking a step toward constructing your future. Don’t be daunted by statistics like the UPenn Early Decision acceptance rate, overall acceptance rate, or UPenn average GPA. Those numbers are just one part of a complex application review process. Instead, just remember to make the most of it and have fun. Good luck!

This guide was written by Saphia Suarez. If you want to know how to get into UPenn, we’ve got you covered. CollegeAdvisor.com’s network of 300+ Admissions Experts (and former admissions officers) includes UPenn graduates. Create your free account or schedule a free advising consultation by calling (844) 343-6272.

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University of Pennsylvania Perelman School of Medicine – UPenn Secondary Essays & Tips

• Cracking Med School Admissions

Getting accepted to Perelman School of Medicine at the University of Pennsylvania is hard. Very hard. Submitting an OUTSTANDING UPenn secondary application is vital to receiving an interview invite, which ultimately can lead to an acceptance. Perelman School of Medicine loves to recruit the best of the best. Although the UPenn secondary essays are short, you have to convey your leadership and vision to advance medicine. Read more of our UPenn secondaries tips below! Your AMCAS primary application and UPenn medical school secondary application must show strong research and strong academics. 

The UPenn secondary application is rather short, so if you receive a secondary from the admissions committee, make sure to fill it out right away. 

Our Cracking Med School Admissions team has a track record of helping our mentees receive acceptances to UPenn Medical School year after year. We are successful in helping students receive acceptances to both MD, MD/MBA, and MSTP (MD/PhD). C ontact us if you want help or have questions about your UPenn secondary essays. 

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UPenn Medical School Secondary Application Essay Prompts: 2023 – 2024

• If you were offered an option to continue courses with a standard grading system or switch to Pass/Fail, and you chose Pass/Fail, please describe the reason(s) for your decision here. (500 characters max)
• Have you taken any online courses for credit? (Not due to the COVID-19 pandemic)
• Have you been nominated for or received an award from any state, regional or national organization?
• Have you taken or are you planning to take time off between college graduation and medical school matriculation? (500 characters max)
• Have you participated in any global activities outside of the U.S. prior to submitting your AMCAS application? (1,000 characters max)
• Are there any special, unique, personal, or challenging aspects of your personal background or circumstances that you would like to share with the Committee on Admissions, not addressed elsewhere (siblings/relatives at Penn, applying as a couple, educational environment, culture, ethnicity, etc.) (If yes, 1,000 characters max)
• Have you or your family experienced economic hardships? (1,000 characters max)
• Have you been employed at the University of Pennsylvania Health System or Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia and worked with a Penn faculty mentor? If yes, please indicate name, department, phone number of faculty, and start/end dates.
• The Perelman School of Medicine (PSOM) is deeply committed to recruiting a diverse class to enrich an inclusive team-based learning experience. How would you and your life experiences contribute to the diversity of the student body and/or how would you contribute to an inclusive atmosphere at PSOM? (1,000 characters max)
• Please explain your reasons for applying to the Perelman School of Medicine. (1,000 characters max)

Tips to Answer UPenn Secondary Essays

UPenn Secondaries Pre-Writing Guidance: The UPenn secondary application is rather short with fewer essays and a low character limit. Many of the questions are yes/no. So if you receive a secondary from the admissions committee, make sure to fill it out right away.  

• Read all our secondary essay tips –   Cracking Med Secondary Essay Workbook and Examples

UPenn Secondary Essays Tip #1: Highlight your leadership, passion to change healthcare, and impact on society. What is your vision to advance medicine? How will you pursue that vision throughout your career in medicine? 

What will make you stand out is if you can convey your desire to be innovative and improve healthcare through interdisciplinary approaches. The undergraduate and graduate schools of University of Pennsylvania are extremely collaborative, and there is a lot of cross-school / cross-department projects. If you like interdisciplinary approaches to improve healthcare, then this school is for you. 

UPenn Secondary Essays Tip #2: Other than leadership & innovation, Perelman School of Medicine at the University of Pennsylvania values research and clinical experiences. Make sure to include research + patient care in your UPenn secondaries. 

UPenn Secondary Essays Tip #3: Don’t forget to add awards, even if you included them in your primary application / AMCAS work & activities section.

Common awards mentioned for in UPenn secondaries:  Marshall Scholar, Rhodes Scholar, Fulbright Scholar, Gates Scholar, Truman Scholar, national research grants

UPenn Secondary Essays Tip #4: Be very specific about why you want to go to UPenn School of Medicine. Talk about projects and research you want to do at UPenn. UPenn is a very interdisciplinary institution, so don’t hold back if you have ideas to work with a leader in the business school professor, a nursing in the School of Nursing, or a professor in the University of Pennsylvania School of Engineering. Read an example of how to write a strong “ why this medical school ” essay. For this UPenn secondary, you don’t have much space! Be very specific in opportunities you want to take advantage of at UPenn.

UPenn Secondary Essays Tip #5: For the UPenn secondaries question, “ The Perelman School of Medicine (PSOM) is deeply committed to recruiting a diverse class to enrich an inclusive team-based learning experience. How would you and your life experiences contribute to the diversity of the student body and/or how would you contribute to an inclusive atmosphere at PSOM? ” For the diversity essays, remember that diversity is all encompassing. We recommend our students to talk about their strengths and skills they will bring to the Perelman School of Medicine. It is important to convey to UPenn that you have made a big impact on the world through your activities.

• Read more tips for diversity essays:  Medical School Diversity Essay Examples and Tips
• Examples from our past successful students : Innovations through research; Founding a public health organization; Working with the World Health Organization; Leading a global health initiative

UPenn Secondary Essays Tip #6: It is super important that you have guidance from advisors from top medical schools and who repeatedly have helped medical school applicants get accepted to UPenn Perelman School of Medicine. Contact us below. Need editing help on your secondary? We can help you edit and strategize your UPenn secondaries through our secondary essay packages .

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Advising students to attend their dream schools.

Undergraduate Johns Hopkins University, Phi Beta Kappa

Residency Stanford, Pediatrics

Awards & Scholarships Marshall Scholar Tylenol Scholarship Global Health Scholar

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UPenn Medical School Secondary Application Essay Prompts: 2022 – 2023

• Were there changes to your academic work and/or personal circumstances due to the COVID-19 pandemic that you would like to share with the committee? Yes or No? If yes, please describe these changes during this time. (500 characters max)

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UPenn Medical School Secondary Application Essay Prompts: 2021 – 2022

Upenn medical school secondary application essay prompts: 2020 – 2021.

• Were there changes to your academic work and/or personal circumstances due to the COVID-19 pandemic that you would like to share with the committee?  Yes or No? If yes, please describe these changes during this time.  (500 characters max)
• If you were offered an option to continue courses with a standard grading system or switch to Pass/Fail, and you chose Pass/Fail, please describe the reason(s) for your decision here.  (500 characters max)
• Have you taken or are you planning to take time off between college graduation and medical school matriculation?  (500 characters max)
• Have you participated in any global activities outside of the U.S. prior to submitting your AMCAS application?  (1,000 characters max)
• Are there any special, unique, personal, or challenging aspects of your personal background or circumstances that you would like to share with the Committee on Admissions, not addressed elsewhere (siblings/relatives at Penn, applying as a couple, educational environment, culture, ethnicity, etc.)  (If yes, 1,000 characters max)
• Have you or your family experienced economic hardships?  (1,000 characters max)
• Please explain your reasons for applying to the Perelman School of Medicine.  (1,000 characters max)

UPenn Medical School Secondary Application Essay Prompts: 2019 – 2020

• Have you taken any online courses for credit? Yes or No?
• Have you been nominated for or received an award from any state, regional or national organization? Yes or No? List all awards received.
• Have you participated in any global activities outside of the U.S. prior to submitting your AMCAS application? (If yes, 1,000 characters max)
• Have you or your family experienced economic hardships?  (If yes, 1,000 characters max)

UPenn Medical School Secondary Application Essay Prompts: 2018 – 2019

• Have you taken any online courses for credit?  Yes or No?
• Have you been nominated for or received an award from any state, regional or national organization?  Yes or No?  List all awards received.
• Have you taken or are you planning to take time off between college graduation and medical school matriculation?  (If yes, 1,000 characters max)
• Have you participated in any global activities outside of the U.S. prior to submitting your AMCAS application?  (If yes, 1,000 characters max)

UPenn Medical School Secondary Application Essay Prompts: 2017 – 2018

Upenn medical school secondary application essay prompts: 2016 – 2017, upenn medical school secondary application essay prompts: 2015 – 2016.

• Have you been nominated for or received an award from any state, regional or national organization? If so, please describe. (Each line, 100 characters max)
• Have you taken or are you planning to take time off between college graduation and medical school matriculation?  (If yes, 500 characters max)
• If you are traveling outside of the U.S. during the application year, will you need special scheduling if invited for an interview? If so, please describe and indicate dates that you are in the U.S. (255 characters max)

UPenn Medical School Secondary Application Essay Prompts: 2014 – 2015

• Have you been nominated for or received an award from any state, regional or national organization? If so, please describe.  (Each line, 100 characters max)
• Have you taken or are you planning to take time off between college graduation and medical school matriculation?  (If yes, 250 characters max)
• Have you participated in any global activities outside of the U.S. prior to submitting your AMCAS application?
• Are there any special, unique, personal, or challenging circumstances that you would like to share with the Committee on Admissions (siblings/relatives at Penn, applying as a couple, educational environment, culture, ethnicity, etc.)

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How You Should Think About Writing your UPenn Essays

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What’s Covered:

The supplemental essay prompts for upenn.

• What Does UPenn Look for When Evaluating Essays?

What You Should Write About in Your Essays

The University of Pennsylvania (UPenn) requires its applicants to submit a personal essay, most frequently through the Common Application, and three supplemental essays in addition. There are additional supplemental essays that are required for some applicants, such as those for particular programs or transferring from another school. 

The three supplemental essays required for all applicants are: 

• “Write a short thank-you note to someone you have not yet thanked and would like to acknowledge. (We encourage you to share this note with that person, if possible, and reflect on the experience!)” (150-200 words)  
• “How will you explore community at Penn? Consider how Penn will help shape your perspective and identity, and how your identity and perspective will help shape Penn.” (150-200 words) 
• “Considering the specific undergraduate school you have selected, describe how you intend to explore your academic and intellectual interests at the University of Pennsylvania.” (150-200 words) 

If you are looking for an overview of UPenn’s supplemental essays and advice on how to write your responses, check out this article on CollegeVine. 

What Does UPenn Look for When Evaluating Essays? 

UPenn refers to their essays as a way to learn what applicants value, how they see the world, and what their voices will bring to the school’s community. In a nutshell, the admissions officers at the University of Pennsylvania are trying to get to know you through your responses. 

The admissions office suggests that applicants review each prompt thoroughly, consider responses carefully, and double-check their writing. As such, organizing your thoughts, writing intentional responses, and proofreading your UPenn essays is key to the process. 

Keep in Mind Your Common App Essay

Remember that UPenn is also evaluating your 650-word personal statement, most likely submitted through the Common App. Supplemental essays are an opportunity to highlight another aspect of yourself, instead just revisiting other application materials. 

If possible, consider this when writing both your Common App essay and supplemental essays. Applicants should not focus on something that has already been covered in another part of their application. For example, because UPenn’s third prompt asks you to discuss an academic interest, writing about your intended major in your Common App essay might make finding a topic for your supplemental essays more difficult.. Writing a unique Common App essay helps applicants avoid this overlap and keep things engaging for the admissions officers reviewing your application.

Show Different Sides of Yourself

If you are unsure how to ensure each essay is distinct, start by trying to brainstorm what the fundamental elements of your personality are, the values you hold, and the experiences you have had. Then, for each supplemental essay prompt, see if you can focus on a different item in that list. Because the admissions officers are using these essays to get to know you as a person, you want to make sure that your essays touch on different aspects of who you are.

Another thing to keep in mind is that the tone of your essays should vary, as well. Submitting some essays that are more serious, while keeping others lighthearted, is more likely to keep the reader interested. It also allows you to show off different sides of your writing style and personality. 

Related CollegeVine Blog Posts

University of Pennsylvania (UPenn) 2020-21 Supplemental Essay Prompt Guide

Regular Decision: 

University of Pennsylvania 2020-21 Application Essay Question Explanations 

The Requirements: 1 essay of 300-450 words; 1 essay of 150-200 words

Supplemental Essay Type(s):  Community , Why

How will you explore your intellectual and academic interests at the University of Pennsylvania? Please answer this question given the specific undergraduate school to which you are applying. (300-450 words)

*students applying to digital media design and computer & cognitive science should address both the specialized program and single-degree choice in their response. for students applying to the other coordinated dual-degree and specialized programs, please answer this question in regards to your single-degree school choice; your interest in the coordinated dual-degree or specialized program may be addressed through the program-specific essay..

You’ve probably seen this before: the why essay. Clocking in between 300 and 450 words, UPenn’s take on this classic prompt is on the longer side. There’s only one thing to do, the same thing we always tell you to do: research, research, research. Set aside some quality time to get up close and personal with UPenn’s website (or campus if you’re able to visit) and take some detailed notes on everything that appeals to you. Go deep. Read some descriptions of the classes you will take in your major and Google the professors you will be learning from. Think about telling a story that illustrates your path to UPenn: how do its’ offerings align with your own interests and goals? You could, alternatively, paint an aspirational picture of what you’d be like on campus. Any way you slice it, you should be focusing on “intellectual and academic interests” related to the undergraduate school to which you’re applying. Show admissions that UPenn the ideal fit for you and your academic goals. 

At Penn, learning and growth happen outside of the classroom, too. How will you explore the community at Penn? Consider how this community will help shape your perspective and identity, and how your identity and perspective will help shape this community. (150-200 words) 

UPenn’s first prompt asks about your intellectual and academic pursuits, but admissions also wants to know about who you are and what you’d like to do when you’re not cramming for exams and soaking up your professor’s sage wisdom. Start by thinking about the here and now. Where can you be found when your homework is done? How do you spend your weekends? Think of something that gets you interacting with others or diving deep into your area of expertise. Admissions wants to know what your area of influence will look like at UPenn: an on-campus job, a unique hobby, or maybe an organization to which you contribute innovative ideas and exquisite cake decorating skills. (Bake sale, anyone?) Finally, remember to address how UPenn will shape your identity and vice versa. Will the Black Wharton Undergraduate Association help you to explore your entrepreneurial interests? Will your plethora of non-profit internship and volunteering experience make you a fantastic addition to and a natural leader in the Social Impact Consulting Group? Whatever you write about, make sure your response to this prompt shows that you have put some serious thought into what your life will look like at UPenn. 

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An Intoxicating 500-Year-Old Mystery

The Voynich Manuscript has long baffled scholars—and attracted cranks and conspiracy theorists. Now a prominent medievalist is taking a new approach to unlocking its secrets.

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L isa Fagin Davis was starting her medieval-studies Ph.D. at Yale in 1989 when she got a part-time job at the university’s Beinecke Rare Book & Manuscript Library. Her boss was the curator of early books and manuscripts, and he stuck her with an unenviable duty: answering letters from the cranks, conspiracists, and truthers who hounded the library with questions about its most popular holding.

In the library catalog, the book— a parchment codex the size of a hardcover novel —had a simple, colorless title: “Cipher Manuscript.” But newspapers tended to call it the “Voynich Manuscript,” after the rare-books dealer Wilfrid Voynich, who acquired it from a Jesuit collection in Italy around 1912. An heir sold the manuscript to another dealer, who donated it to Yale in 1969.

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Davis grew up in Oklahoma City, transfixed by the fantasy worlds of J. R. R. Tolkien and Dungeons & Dragons. When the Beinecke curator first showed her the Voynich Manuscript, she thought, This is the coolest thing I’ve ever seen.

Its 234 pages contained some 38,000 words, but not one of them was readable. The book’s unnamed author had written it, likely with a quill pen, in symbols never before seen. Did they represent a natural language, such as Latin? A constructed language, like Esperanto? A secret code? Gibberish? Scholars had no real idea. To Davis, however, the manuscript felt alive with meaning.

Flowering through the indecipherable script were otherworldly illustrations: strange, prehistoric-looking plants with leaves in dreamy geometries; oversize pages that folded out to reveal rosettes, zodiacs, stars, the cosmos; lists of apparent medicinal formulas alongside drawings of herbs and spindly bottles. Most striking of all were the groups of naked women. They held stars on strings, like balloons, or stood in green pools fed by trickling ducts and by pipes that looked like fallopian tubes . Many of the women, arms outstretched, seemed less to be bathing than working, as plumbers in some primordial waterworks.

Although the book’s parchment and pigments looked medieval, the drawings of the women had no close cultural parallel, in any era. Even the plants—which appeared to have the stems of one species and the roots of another—resisted identification.

Davis, then 23 years old, with a rosy sense of the world’s knowability, wanted to figure out what the Voynich Manuscript was, what it meant, where it came from. But people in her field saw the Voynich as a waste of time, a house-of-curiosities gewgaw unworthy of the serious scholar, especially when so many legible manuscripts begged for study.

From the June 2020 issue: Ariel Sabar on a biblical mystery at Oxford

In any case, scholars had already tried. The manuscript had reeled them in with what one cryptanalyst called a “surface appearance of simplicity”: letters that looked glancingly Latin, words that repeated with language-like regularity, handwriting that had the easy flow of a long-established script. But Renaissance-era intellectuals, Ivy League professors, and spy-agency code breakers—including William Friedman, who cracked Japan’s World War II “Purple” cipher before becoming the National Security Agency’s chief cryptographer—all toiled in vain to unlock the Voynich’s secrets. So many headline-making “solutions” had been debunked over the years that the text had earned a reputation, in the words of a Beinecke librarian, as “the place where academic careers go to die.”

Read: “Pure poison” for a scholarly career

For all anyone knew, the manuscript was nothing more than the ravings of a lunatic, or a hoax to dupe some fool into paying a fortune for it. In his magisterial history of code breaking , the writer David Kahn called the Voynich “the longest, the best known, the most tantalizing, the most heavily attacked, the most resistant” of cryptographic puzzles. H. P. Kraus, the dealer who donated the manuscript to Yale, once likened it to the mythical Sphinx, “its lair strewn with the bones of those who failed to solve the riddle, and still awaiting the Oedipus who will give the right answer.”

To the aspirants who wrote to the Beinecke, Davis sent minimalist replies: prints, from microfilm, of whatever pages they requested, without comment. The Beinecke got more than enough attention from unstable-seeming “Voynich people.” Davis was careful not to encourage them, or to betray her own fascination. When she began checking out books on the manuscript—to feed her own curiosity—she didn’t tell her boss, a medievalist who would soon become her dissertation adviser. “What I wanted more than anything,” she told me, “was for him to respect me.” But the further along she got in graduate school, the less she thought about the Voynich, until she scarcely thought of it at all. If her field saw the manuscript as beneath its dignity, then perhaps she should too.

I met Davis in Boston this past March, some 35 years after her youthful infatuation with the manuscript. She had risen to one of her discipline’s most visible posts: executive director of the Medieval Academy of America, the premier professional organization for North American medievalists, which she has led for more than a decade. Its offices are a 20-minute walk from her penthouse condo, where she lives with her husband, Dan Davis, a finance executive. Their balcony overlooks Boston Harbor and the meeting of the Charles and Mystic Rivers, with Old North Church in the distance.

Davis, 58, has the air of the college roommate you could spend hours staring at the stars with, casually unraveling the meaning of the universe. She has a cascade of dark corkscrew curls, and wears purple-lensed glasses—indoors and out—that “pretty much everyone,” she said, mistakes for an affectation. In fact, she has a rare disorder that causes double vision, and the tinted lenses stabilize her sight. Eventually, “I’ll just start wearing an eye patch,” she said, and “go the pirate route.”

My visit came after an unexpected turn of events. The Voynich Manuscript had reentered Davis’s life, forcing her to reconsider almost everything she thought she knew about it. The manuscript’s notoriety—as history’s hardest puzzle; as grist for unhinged conspiracies—had for many years scared scholars away. But what if you looked past its extravagant strangeness? What if you focused instead on the things—little noticed—that it shared with countless other manuscripts?

Could the ordinary illuminate the extraordinary? Davis resolved to find out.

The youngest of three siblings, and the only girl, Davis grew up in a home suffused with serendipitous discovery. Floor tiles in the family room doubled as a chessboard. Posters designed by her mother, a poet, took common exclamations, such as “Good God,” and split them (“Good / God”) to inspire alternative readings.

When Davis wasn’t singing in school musicals—her star turn was as Annie Oakley in Annie Get Your Gun —she buried herself in the Lord of the Rings trilogy and recited poems in Tolkien’s Elvish. She loved the backstories that Tolkien created for his made-up languages. “The invention of languages is the foundation,” Tolkien once wrote. “The ‘stories’ were made rather to provide a world for the languages than the reverse.”

Girls in Davis’s middle school didn’t tend to share these interests. When her geeky older brothers played Dungeons & Dragons, she waitressed their games, as “the beer wench.” At 13, “I was like, ‘Screw this,’ ” she recalled. She got her own dungeon, and led adventures for a group of fellow eighth graders, all boys.

During college, at Brown, she spent a summer singing show tunes on dinner cruises in Boston Harbor. She’d hoped to become a professional actress. But after struggling to land roles in college plays, she took classes on the history of theater, where she found herself drawn to medieval drama—which fused her childhood interests. She majored in medieval studies, and in a senior-year class, she ran her fingers across medieval parchment for the first time. I’m touching something that somebody touched 800 years ago , she thought. The connection felt immediate, she told me, and “magical and really powerful.”

At Yale, Davis answered letters to the library about the Voynich, but she abandoned her own research on it. She had failed to hook even her own brother. Barry Fagin, then a young computer-engineering professor at Dartmouth, had a background in cryptology but gave up on the Voynich after a few tries. “You can beat your head against these kinds of problems for years,” he told me, “and then you wake up one morning and you find you’ve wasted your life.”

Davis’s boss at the Beinecke introduced her to a 12th-century liturgical manuscript known as the Gottschalk Antiphonary, and Davis wrote her dissertation on it. The Gottschalk was the sort of text—Latin, Christian, European—on which medievalists built respectable careers. Davis earned her Ph.D. in 1993 and became a sought-after consultant, cataloging medieval manuscripts for some of the country’s top collections and compiling, with her colleague Melissa Conway, the definitive directory of such manuscripts in North America, a project Davis chronicled on her blog, Manuscript Road Trip.

Then, in 2014, the Medieval Academy of America hired her as its executive director. She became the public face of a field that wanted little to do with the Voynich. But the Voynich wasn’t done with her.

When Davis opened her email in February 2016, the message from Yale University Press surprised her. It asked if she would peer-review the essays in a forthcoming “facsimile edition” of the Voynich Manuscript, a coffee-table book that featured high-resolution, life-size images of every one of its pages.

The Beinecke’s then-director, Edwin C. Schroeder, had grown frustrated by the constant questions his staff got about the Voynich: Its popularity, he told me, was “orders of magnitude” greater than anything else at the library. The Beinecke—a marble-paned building somewhere between modernist cathedral and spaceship—held more than 1 million genuinely meaningful texts, among them a Shakespeare First Folio, a Gutenberg Bible, the papers of Edith Wharton, and a third-century fragment of a Pauline Epistle.

But sometimes it felt as if the only text that visitors cared about was the one nobody could read. And too often, the way they cared about it was to proclaim that they’d solved it. “Part of the challenge,” Schroeder told me, “was that people were regularly contacting us saying, ‘Here’s my theory, what’s my reward?’ ” The Beinecke didn’t offer rewards, the librarians would have to explain, and it didn’t judge theories. But with little rigorous scholarship to point people to, wild ideas bloomed.

A New Jersey doctor argued that the Voynich was a manual, in Flemish creole, of death rites for an ancient cult of Isis. A Texas chemist spied what she took to be the signature of Leonardo da Vinci. The author of a guide to the end of the world theorized that a “Semite” had written the Voynich in scrambled Hebrew, to record a message from extraterrestrials about “our future doom.” A man writing from jail believed that the manuscript was a childhood project of his from the 1980s, written in his own blood. “He kept telling us he was coming to get it,” a Yale official told me. (The library contacted the campus police.)

The manuscript’s unintelligibility had made it a blank screen, onto which people freely projected their own fantasies. When Beinecke officials permitted one self-proclaimed scholar to examine the Voynich—only to see a social-media post afterward about her conducting some sort of séance—“it was like, ‘All right,’ ” Schroeder recalled, “ ‘we need to change some of the conversation.’ ”

Schroeder hoped that a high-quality reproduction, surrounded by accessible essays, would shift interest away from “Break the code!” and toward questions of history. Who might have produced such a work, and why? What do the drawings reveal about the illustrator’s understanding of botany, astronomy, and biology? What kinds of knowledge did earlier cultures encrypt, and how did they do it?

In its email asking Davis to vet the book before publication, the Yale press wrote, “We know that you are an expert in the subject.” That was news to Davis. True, while blogging about the Beinecke a year earlier, she had written a jokey post on the Voynich , warning readers about the “dark scary corner of the internet” where the manuscript’s obsessives lurked. But since leaving graduate school and her Beinecke job more than two decades earlier, she had rarely given it a thought, much less studied it.

But when she read the essays, she felt her broader training as a medievalist kick in. The book treated the Voynich not as some alien vessel of dangerous secrets, but as any other historical manuscript with a physical reality and a past. The volume’s editor was the Beinecke’s new early-books-and-manuscripts curator, a historian named Raymond Clemens. Times had changed.

One essay told of how Wilfrid Voynich remade himself from a Polish revolutionary into a charming New York antiquarian. Another documented the Voynich’s suspected provenance, with evidence suggesting that the manuscript had been owned by the 16th-century Holy Roman Emperor Rudolf II before passing through the hands of a court pharmacist, a Prague alchemist, a Bohemian doctor, and a German polymath on its way to the Jesuits in Italy. There were reports on recent radiocarbon tests dating the calfskin parchment to between 1404 and 1438, and on the University of Pennsylvania philosopher William Romaine Newbold, who in 1921 became the first of many Voynich theorists to succumb to grandiose delusions of having solved it. Newbold’s code-breaking key involved so many freewheeling steps that one could make the text say practically anything. Newbold was convinced that the wily 13th-century friar Roger Bacon had not only written the manuscript but illustrated it with things—the Andromeda galaxy, spermatozoa—that he’d glimpsed through a telescope or microscope hundreds of years before those instruments were thought to have been invented.

Davis’s response to Yale University Press was a rave. The existing Voynich literature contained so much “unscientific and unsupported rubbish” that people couldn’t tell fact from fiction, she wrote. A book of sound, citable research was “long-overdue.”

Titled The Voynich Manuscript and priced at $50, the book would sell some 55,000 copies. (“For a rare-book library, that’s best-seller land,” Schroeder told me.) But if the Beinecke’s leaders thought it would change the conversation or slow the influx of questions, they had miscalculated. The ranks of enthusiasts—or “Voynicheros,” as they’re sometimes called—appeared only to grow. Over the next few years, new theories spread from the internet into the pages of venerable publications.

In 2017, the Times Literary Supplement ran a cover story titled simply “Voynich Manuscript: The Solution,” by the author of a book on how to write and sell TV screenplays. The man, who said he had a “commission from a television production company to analyse the illustrations of the Voynich manuscript,” announced that each character represented an abbreviated Latin word. The text, he argued, was a health manual , complete with recipes, for “the more well to do women in society.”

Read: Has the Voynich manuscript really been solved?

The next year, a headline in The Times of Israel declared, “Scientists Claim to Crack an Elusive Centuries-Old Code—And It’s Hebrew.” The article cited a study by a pair of non-Hebrew-speaking computer scientists who claimed that the Voynich’s author used anagrams and an alphabetic-substitution cipher, even though the resulting “Hebrew” made almost no sense.

Around the same time, a Canadian civil engineer concluded that the Voynich was a Tibetan Bible, while a Russian electrical engineer glimpsed an algorithm, according to one news report, “for conducting a ritual that protected women from sexual violence by vampires.”

Committed to its no-comment policy, the Beinecke started referring Voynich theorists—and the reporters who covered them—to Davis. Again the library was sending her its Voynich headaches, much as it had some 25 years earlier, when she was a student-worker there.

This time, however, Davis had the stature, and the freedom, to tell people what she really thought.

In May 2019, the University of Bristol issued an eye-catching news release: A biological scientist named Gerard Cheshire had used “lateral thinking and ingenuity” to identify the Voynich’s language (“proto-Romance,” he termed it). It had taken him, he said, just two weeks. “I experienced a series of ‘eureka’ moments whilst deciphering the code, followed by a sense of disbelief and excitement when I realised the magnitude of the achievement.” He concluded that Dominican nuns had compiled the manuscript as a medical and astrological reference for Maria of Castile, a great-aunt of King Henry VIII’s first wife.

The manuscript, Cheshire wrote, was “dominated by female issues, activities and adventures” because the men in Maria’s castle were off to battle, “leaving the women and girls sexually and emotionally frustrated, so they amused and distracted themselves whilst they waited and yearned for male attention to return.”

Cheshire had written to Davis more than a year before the news release, asking if she could help him publish his paper. “You may indeed be on to something,” Davis had replied politely. But in careful, line-by-line notes, she identified what she saw as significant errors in his logic, methods, and history.

Like so many others, she thought, he had pronounced a solution and then produced evidence for it, rather than working open-mindedly from facts to theory. At best, his ideas were a “hypothesis,” she told him; they weren’t a solution.

But Davis had found that most Voynicheros didn’t want nuanced critique; they wanted blanket affirmation—or, as Davis put it one morning as we walked to her office in downtown Boston, “Oh my God! You did it! Here’s a cookie!” When she quibbled with a man who’d argued that some of the Voynich’s letterforms represented dance choreography, he retorted, “Now I understand what Galileo must have gone through.” Cheshire grew similarly hostile after failing to convert Davis. “Try to shake off the Voynich spell,” he wrote to her. “I don’t want you to lose face when the penny eventually drops.”

When the University of Bristol announced Cheshire’s solution, it generated credulous headlines, in part because a peer-reviewed journal had published his article. Davis, stunned, slammed it in the media and on Twitter : “Sorry, folks, ‘proto-Romance language’ is not a thing. This is just more aspirational, circular, self-fulfilling nonsense.”

An attack by the head of the Medieval Academy was no small matter. The University of Bristol deleted its news release, distanced itself from Cheshire’s paper, and issued a statement saying that “following media coverage, concerns have been raised about the validity of this research.” Cheshire defended his work as ahead of its time, but the university’s about-face made international news.

Davis was imposing a reputational cost on what she saw as bad Voynich research. She tweeted about the manuscript more than 100 times in 2019. Her posts—some whimsical, others cutting—swelled her Twitter following from a few hundred to more than 10,000.

Her frustrations boiled over in an August 2019 op-ed she wrote for The Washington Post . “We watch ‘Game of Thrones,’ we read ‘Lord of the Rings,’ we play medieval-themed video games, and therefore we think we know something about the Middle Ages,” she wrote. The fantasies that pass for medieval history in popular culture had come for the Voynich, fueling media coverage of shoddy research and “turning an authentic and fascinating medieval manuscript into a caricature of itself.”

But after a couple of years, Davis developed second thoughts about her social-media smackdowns. It was less the hate mail she got from “Voynich bros,” as she called the men who dominated online forums—though that didn’t help. She’d just begun to feel unkind, as though she were punching down at people genuinely inspired by the manuscript’s mysteries. Hadn’t she once been one of them? Her regrets grew after a YouTube channel produced a video of failed Voynich solutions that identified her as “executive director of the Medieval Academy of America and Reigning Queen of Academic Burns.”

If she wanted to dignify the manuscript as worthy of serious scholarship, she realized, she would need to be more than just a critic.

Late in the summer of 2018, an announcement went out about the following year’s International Congress on Medieval Studies: Organizers were soliciting papers for a panel on ciphers, scripts, and shorthands. When Davis replied with a proposal on the Voynich, “it just wasn’t what I was expecting,” Carson Koepke, one of the panel’s organizers, told me. “If it was somebody of a lower caliber than Lisa, I think we would have been much more skeptical.” But Davis was known for painstaking scholarship, and her proposal was accepted.

Davis knew well the Voynich’s reputation as a career killer. But she’d reached a point in her own career where she felt that she could take the risk. Still, she chose to be cautious. Neither a linguist nor a cryptanalyst, she would make no attempt to decode it, she decided. She would instead confine her study to her deepest specializations.

Davis is an elected member of the Comité International de Paléographie Latine, a prestigious guild of the world’s top paleographers and codicologists—experts in, by turns, ancient handwriting and the physical properties of old books. Of the Paris-based society’s 67 members, Davis is one of only four to be admitted from the United States.

She had never conducted a paleographic study of an illegible manuscript, and she wasn’t sure at first that she could. She couldn’t use the Voynich’s handwriting style to place or date it, because there was nothing in history to compare it to. Nor could she avail herself of the most basic paleographic skill: making sense of a scribe’s letterforms, abbreviations, and punctuation—the skill, that is, of reading. How could you read something whose alphabet lacked any known precedent?

That left a single, slim line of attack: counting the manuscript’s hands. Even if a language was unreadable, a good paleographer could spot small, stylistic tells distinguishing one scribe from the next.

Did one person create the Voynich? At first glance, it seemed so: “The handwriting is incredibly consistent throughout,” a onetime Army code breaker had observed in 1946. If the language existed in a kind of vacuum, beyond history’s reach, logic suggested that its creator did too: a hoaxer working furtively in a private office or some lone genius in an attic, disgorging bizarro visions onto parchment by candlelight.

But as Davis magnified the handwriting, she noticed subtle variations. In certain places, the script was more cramped or more likely to slant as it crossed the page. She tested this observation by picking a letter that didn’t appear often and tracking it across the manuscript’s pages. Its style, she saw, varied among groups of pages but not within those groups. This suggested that the differences—larger or smaller loops, straighter or curvier crossbars, longer or shorter feet—were the product of different scribes rather than of one scribe writing the same letter in different ways.

To reduce the possibility of selection bias, Davis examined other letters and found that their styles shifted in lockstep with the first letter. After months of analysis, she concluded that even if the Voynich had a single guiding vision, it was the handiwork of five different scribes.

The book’s physical condition filled in more of the picture. Even before anyone wrote on it, the calfskin parchment had holes where scabs, wounds, or insects had stricken the animal it had come from—one of several signs that the manuscript’s makers couldn’t afford, or didn’t need, the finest materials. The pigments were ordinary, and luxuries, such as gold leaf, were wholly absent. Stains darkened the tops of the manuscript’s first 100-odd pages, from an apparent water spill. Beneath Davis’s fingers, the parchment felt soft, almost cloth-like, a familiar texture in books that were once heavily thumbed. “This is not a manuscript that was meant to be a precious object on a book stand for people to go, ‘Ooooh,’ ” Davis told me. Like a manual of anatomy or an almanac of the stars, it was meant to be flipped through and used.

Davis presented her findings at the medieval-studies conference and published them in 2020 in the journal Manuscript Studies . She had hardly solved the Voynich, but she’d opened it to new kinds of investigation. If five scribes had come together to write it, the manuscript was probably the work of a community, rather than of a single deranged mind or con artist. Why the community used its own language, or code, remains a mystery. Whether it was a cloister of alchemists, or mad monks, or a group like the medieval Béguines—a secluded order of Christian women—required more study. But the marks of frequent use signaled that the manuscript served some routine, perhaps daily function.

Davis’s work brought like-minded scholars out of hiding. In just the past few years, a Yale linguist named Claire Bowern had begun performing sophisticated analyses of the text, building on the efforts of earlier scholars and on methods Bowern had used with undocumented Indigenous languages in Australia. At the University of Malta, computer scientists were figuring out how to analyze the Voynich with tools for natural-language processing. Researchers found that the manuscript’s roughly 38,000 words—and 9,000-word vocabulary—had many of the statistical hallmarks of actual language. The Voynich’s most common word, whatever it meant, appeared roughly twice as often as the second-most-common word and three times as often as the third-commonest, and so on—a touchstone of natural language known as Zipf’s law. The mix of word lengths and the ratio of unique words to total words were similarly language-like. Certain words, moreover, seemed to follow one another in predictable order, a possible sign of grammar.

Finally, each of the text’s sections —as defined by the drawings of plants, stars, bathing women, and so on—had different sets of overrepresented words, just as one would expect in a real book whose chapters focused on different subjects.

Spelling was the chief aberration. The Voynich alphabet—if that’s what it was—appeared to have a conventional 20-odd letters. But compared with known languages, too many of those letters repeated in the same order, both within words and across neighboring words, like a children’s rhyme. In some places, the spellings of adjacent words so converged that a single word repeated two or three times in a row. A rough English equivalent might be something akin to “She sells sea shells by the sea shore.” Another possibility, Bowern told me, was something like pig Latin, or the Yiddishism—known as “shm-reduplication”—that begets phrases such as fancy shmancy and rules shmules .

No known cipher—certainly none from the early 1400s—could produce the Voynich’s overly repetitive letter sequences and its language-like word and letter frequencies. To pull off something similar in English, Bowern and a graduate student found, you’d have to do strange things, like replace all the vowels in a word with a single, catchall character; or anagram the letters of each word into alphabetical order; or lard the text, in some yet-to-be-determined fashion, with nonsense characters, or “nulls.”

But if Voynichese was some reclusive group’s invention, why would its scribes take the extra step of scrambling its letters? Why riddle a puzzle? And yet that’s what the Voynich did, over and over again. The moment you felt you were getting somewhere, it coiled in on itself, retreating from your grasp, into another disguise.

This shape-shifting—this inability to see it from any one angle—persuaded the Malta computer scientists, led by Colin Layfield, to assemble a multidisciplinary team. So little was known about the underlying language—if it was a language—that even artificial intelligence, in its current state, lacked the models to decode it. Good AI requires “massive amounts of data to learn from,” Layfield told me. “We simply don’t have that luxury with the text in the Voynich.” In 2021, Layfield recruited Davis, Bowern, and other specialists, and they began meeting online to develop ideas for collaboration. In late 2022, the Voynich Research Group, as it became known, held its first conference, with 16 peer-reviewed papers , touching on history, literature, paleography, linguistics, cryptology, and—because of some of the drawings—medieval gynecology. Davis was invited to give the closing keynote.

Scholars inside and outside the group are now pressing in a variety of directions. Some are using mathematical tools to hunt for “cribs”: words whose meanings can be inferred because they consistently appear, like labels, beside certain illustrated objects.

Others are reevaluating the alphabets that earlier scholars created to convert the Voynichese letterforms into machine-readable ASCII text—the raw data for computational studies of the language. AI might be unable to decrypt the Voynich, but it could contribute in other ways, once enough of the world’s hundreds of thousands of medieval manuscripts are digitally imaged and accessible. Models trained on those images may eventually develop the power to spot visual similarities to the Voynich—the curvature of a particular pen stroke, the shades of certain pigments—that have eluded the human eye. Those similarities could help scholars identify writing communities with possible ties to the Voynich.

Still conspicuously missing from the research are professional art historians. Scholars of medieval art could bring a whole new field to bear on the Voynich’s illustrated world, but like other medievalists, they have been reluctant to engage.

In a 2020 article in the journal Cryptologia , a pair of European scientists argued that someone could have used a simple formula to give strings of meaningless symbols the structure of language. The Voynich, in their view, is little more than artfully constructed nonsense. But Davis has come to believe that the manuscript has meaning, and that scholars will one day find it. She thinks that an individual is less likely to hit on the solution than a cross-disciplinary team, whose members will turn small, hard-won discoveries into a coherent picture. “A lot of people try to make the argument that surely it would have been read by now if it could be read,” she told me. “But that’s just not enough of a reason to give up hope.” Egypt’s hieroglyphs and the Mycenaean script known as Linear B were also notoriously indecipherable—until the Rosetta Stone and a British genius produced working keys.

But what if the Voynich remains unsolvable? What if the manuscript is in some sense smarter than us all, its anonymous author, or authors, laughing from the grave at the hubris of reason? When I posed these questions to one of Bowern’s graduate students, she recited a Robert Frost poem about all human quests for understanding: “We dance round in a ring and suppose, / But the Secret sits in the middle and knows.”

On a sunny day this past April, I walked into the Beinecke with Davis and Bowern and descended the steps to a basement classroom, where a librarian had set the Voynich on a pillow that keeps stresses off the book’s old body. It was open to a page where a block of inscrutable text is pierced by a plant with leaves that resemble origami frogs.

Bowern teaches an undergraduate Yale linguistics class on the Voynich, and today was her students’ one chance to see it in the flesh. Hands clasped behind their back, many of them leaned gingerly toward its open pages, as if in the presence of something sublime.

From the December 2021 issue: Inside the Manhattan DA’s Antiquities Trafficking Unit

At times Davis, too, still feels the tug of the manuscript’s ineffable magic. But today she had come from Boston to ground Bowern’s students in its hard, physical facts: the parchment thumbed to the softness of felt. The blotches where some ancient reader may have spilled her water jug. The ellipsis of pinpricks where someone with needle and thread had tried, long ago, and without success, to mend one of the parchment’s many holes.

A year earlier, while lecturing at a different college, Davis had fielded a question about what made the Voynich “so sensational.” Was it that some band of medieval women might have come together to preserve their secrets? Was it the text’s spirituality, or the possibility that it said something about the Holy Grail or the Living Water?

Davis gently steered her questioner away from speculation. The Voynich is “not imaginary,” Davis said. “It’s an actual object, it exists in space and time, it has a history, it has physical characteristics, and because of that, it has a true story. We just don’t know what that true story is yet.”

This article appears in the September 2024 print edition with the headline “An Intoxicating 500-Year-Old Mystery.”

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From VP hopeful to Kamala's hype man: Shapiro flexes on Trump and Dem doubters

• Pennsylvania Gov. Josh Shapiro was a top contender to be Kamala Harris' running mate.
• Shapiro's support for Israel and his handling of sexual harassment claims against a former cabinet member may have hurt his chances.

PHILADELPHIA ― When Pennsylvania Gov. Josh Shapiro bounded onto the stage Tuesday evening, he was energetic, charismatic and clearly at home.

It was a glimpse of what might have been. Before the harsh reality of politics set in.

Shapiro swallowed whatever disappointment he may have felt in losing out on the chance to become Vice President Kamala Harris ' running mate and made himself the rousing hype man for the Democratic presidential nominee and Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz , whom Harris had asked just hours earlier to join her on the ticket.

“I love you, Philly – and you know what else I love? I love being your governor!” Shapiro said to deafening cheers from inside Temple University’s Liacouras Center, where Harris and Walz were making their first joint campaign appearance.

For days, it had appeared that Shapiro would end up as Harris’ vice-presidential running mate. He had interviewed for the job, and the choice came down to him and Walz. Harris’s decision to go with Walz stunned many given Shapiro’s credentials: He’s a popular governor of a battleground state that could determine the winner of the election.

But Shapiro also carried considerable baggage that would have made him a risky choice. Shapiro, who is Jewish, has infuriated the Democratic Party’s progressives as well as Arab Americans and Muslims over his support for Israel in its ongoing war in the Gaza Strip.

And while his positions aren't that different from the other names on Harris's shortlist, it was Shapiro who frequently faced the toughest scrutiny.

Shapiro, 51, has been one of the most steadfast Democratic supporters of Israel, arguing that it has a right to defend itself from Hamas. He has been critical of Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, calling him "one of the worst leaders of all time.” But he has also refrained from calling for an immediate cease-fire, which put him at odds with many of the party’s left-wing voters.

How much Shapiro’s stance on Israel – and the possibility that could have splintered the party – weighed on Harris’s decision to pick Walz wasn’t immediately clear. Had Harris chosen him, Shapiro would have been the second practicing Jew to run for vice president, behind the late Connecticut Sen. Joe Lieberman, who ran alongside Al Gore in 2000. But voters have never elected a Jewish president or vice president in the nation's nearly 250-year history.

From the rally stage, Shapiro showed no signs of hard feelings. He heaped praise on Walz, calling him “a dear friend” and “a great patriot” and urging the crowd “to give him a whole lot of love.”

He doubled down on defending his Jewish faith ― and even appeared to be firing back at detractors who had dubbed him "Genocide Josh."

“I lean on my family, and I lean on my faith, which calls me to serve,” Shapiro said. "And I am proud of my faith."

'Family and faith ground me'

Shapiro's faith has been central to his personal life and political career from an early age, when he began a letter-writing campaign to raise awareness about Soviet Jews barred from leaving their country, to the final days of Harris's search for a running mate.

Shapiro grew up in Upper Dublin in Montgomery County, Pennsylvania.

As a child, Shapiro, with the help of his mother, Judi, started a letter-writing program to raise awareness about “refuseniks,” Soviet Jews who were refused permission to emigrate from the Soviet Union, usually to Israel, in the late 1960s through the 1970s.

“These were Soviet Jewish children and families who were refused the ability to leave the Soviet Union, to practice their faith and to live free lives,” he said during an interview with the USA Today Network when running for governor in 2021. “And my mom served on those issues, and she got me inspired to work on those issues as well,”

Shapiro’s pen-pal in that program, a boy named Avi, traveled to America to attend Shapiro’s bar mitzvah at the Beth Shalom synagogue near Upper Dublin. Avi’s family were granted asylum in Israel soon after.

Growing up, Shapiro attended the Forman Hebrew Day School and then the Akiba Hebrew Academy, now the Jack M. Barrack Hebrew Academy.

During his 2022 gubernatorial bid, Shapiro didn't shy away from his faith — and neither did his opponent, state Sen. Doug Mastriano, a self-described Christian nationalist from Franklin County.

In his first campaign TV ad, Shapiro said no matter where he starts his day, "I make it home Friday night for Sabbath dinner," which he celebrates with his wife and four children every week, "because family and faith ground me."

Mastriano, speaking to supporters, said Shapiro harbored "disdain for people like us," because he "grew up in a privileged neighborhood, attended one of the most privileged schools in the nation as a young man... sending his four kids to the same privileged, exclusive, elite school."

Shapiro, however, turned Mastriano's extremist views against him, criticizing him for his ties to other Christian nationalists, including Andrew Torba, founder of the conservative social media platform Gab.

More: Why Kamala Harris chose Tim Walz over Josh Shapiro as her running mate

Israel's war with Hamas

Since the attack on Israel by Hamas and other Palestinian militants in Gaza on Oct. 7, 2023, Shapiro has several times rankled progressives and Arab-American and Muslim populations angered over Israel's response to the war. Israeli forces have killed nearly 40,000 Palestinian civilians and combatants, according to the Palestinian Health Ministry.

Shapiro has supported Israel's right to defend itself from Hamas. But he also has refrained from calling for a cease-fire, made references to the Ku Klux Klan in discussing pro-Palestinian protestors, and raised questions about his support for free-speech rights in calling for the firing for University of Pennsylvania President Elizabeth Magill over anti-Israel campus protests.

Some Shapiro defenders have said that the popular governor's position on Israel differs little from other Democratic lawmakers and that criticism of him is antisemitic.

Over the weekend, for example, he was forced to defend an essay he wrote for his college newspaper in which he suggested that Palestinians were “too battle-minded” to achieve a two-state solution in the Middle East. Shapiro said his views have evolved in the three decades since he penned the article, but critics called his remarks racist and anti-Palestinian.

Amy Spitalnick, CEO of the Jewish Council for Public Affairs, said she finds the conversation about Shapiro to be "concerning" and said he has "positions on Israel that largely align with the vast majority of other potential VP candidates."

“There's a lot of important and constructive debate and criticism that should happen around his policies or anyone else's policies” when it comes to Israel or campus protests, she said. But “if it's only the Jewish candidate that is being singled out with terms like ‘Genocide Josh,’ then that is deeply problematic.”

More: New poll shows Josh Shapiro and Mark Kelly have higher favorability than Tim Walz

Other factors also may have kept Shapiro off the presidential ticket.

"There may have been an experience factor," said Robert Speel, professor of political science at Penn State's Behrend campus in Erie, Pa. "Walz not only has served as governor for six years, but he also served in Congress for many years before that. He also was an officer in the Army National Guard and served for a couple of decades. Tim Walz certainly has an impressive resume, which may have given him a boost over Shapiro."

Like Harris, Shapiro is a former state attorney general, but he has served as governor for less than two years, has no experience on the federal level and lacks military bona fides.

"There were some negative attributes to a potential Shapiro choice," Speel said. "One was his past support for school vouchers, which is not particularly popular with liberals. Second, the way he reacted last fall when there were protesters at university campuses in Philadelphia incensed over what was happening in the Middle East. There were many Democrats, particularly young Democrats, who were not happy with Shapiro kind of joining in with Republicans to attack student protestors. That may have played a role as well."

Shapiro, who many consider a moderate Democrat, would have added an ideological balance to the ticket while also helping Harris nab a critical battleground state.

Shapiro's candidacy, however, faced opposition on multiple fronts.

More: Josh Shapiro's vice presidential prospects spark debate over Israel policy, antisemitism

Sex scandal

Also, haunting Shapiro were questions about what he knew and when he knew it about sexual harassment claims involving a former cabinet member.

Last fall, Shapiro's office quietly settled for $295,000 a claim that a longtime ally had made numerous sexual advances toward a subordinate, as well as lewd comments about the subordinate, other female staffers and a female state senator, as The (Philadelphia) Inquirer has reported . The employee had only been on the job for two months when Mike Vereb, Shapiro's secretary of legislative affairs, allegedly began making the comments.

Days after the woman told Vereb that his conduct was becoming the subject of office gossip, she was called into a meeting with the human resources department for the governor's office. Vereb later mentioned to her that the meeting was about performance issues with her job.

The woman resigned in March after that meeting and a separate meeting with Shapiro staffers in which she addressed her concerns. She provided a statement to the state Office of Equal Opportunity that month, and in June filed a complaint with the state Human Relations Commission. The settlement, which included a non-disclosure agreement that prohibits all parties from commenting on the matter, was paid in September. Vereb resigned weeks later.

Shapiro has been peppered with questions about why Vereb was allowed to remain in his job for months after the allegations were lodged against him.

'It's kind of bittersweet'

At the campaign rally in Philadelphia, Marc Seide, a 34-year-old web designer from Philadelphia, said he believes Walz "balances out" the ticket and that Shapiro's opposition from progressives might have posed too many challenges.

"The is my first campaign event of the year, and I'm excited. I'm really excited to see how this goes," Seide said. "To go from (Joe) Biden to Harris and to see that energy out here in the crowd − it's tremendous."

Robin Reid, 63, of Philadelphia, said she had been rooting for Shapiro to become Harris' running mate "because he’s from Pennsylvania, and he’s just relatable.

"I’ve never heard of Tim Walz,” Reid said.

“But at the same time," she added, "we were afraid of losing Josh Shapiro, so it’s kind of bittersweet."

Contributing: Riley Beggin

Matthew Rink can be reached at  [email protected]  or on X at  @ETNRink . Michael Collins covers the White House and can be reached @mcollinsNEWS.

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Faculty & Instructors

Lin Meng Walsh

• Visiting Instructor of Japanese

PhD, Stanford University, (In progress, expected 2025)

Office Hours: By appointment

I am currently completing my doctoral degree in Japanese literature at Stanford University. Prior to joining the faculty at the University of Rochester, I conducted dissertation research as a research fellow at Waseda University in Tokyo with the support of a Fulbright-Hays fellowship.

• MA Stanford University (2017)
• Inter-University Center for Japanese Language Studies (Yokohama, 2016)
• BA Pennsylvania State University (2014)

Research Overview

My dissertation is a comparative project that studies the literary form of the fragmented essay (Ch: suibi ; J: zuihitsu ) in Manchukuo—the puppet state installed by the Empire of Japan in 1932. In the East Asian literary topography, the Chinese suibi and the Japanese zuihitsu maintain prominent presence yet have received little critical attention. Through a rigorous engagement with Chinese and Japanese-language fragmented essays, I offer fresh insights into the notions of literariness, fictionality, and representation. I illuminate how writers used suibi and zuihitsu —forms conventionally associated with the “unaffected” and the “personal”—as world-making instruments alternative to fictional narrativization. Literary expressions that adopted the practice of “sincerity” became especially salient in the context of Manchukuo—a polity described by historian Prasenjit Duara as a “symbolic regime of authenticity” (2003).

My second project shifts the focus to women’s creative enterprise in Manchukuo. Spotlighting figures including Sakane Tazuko, Yamaguchi Yoshiko (Li Xianglan/Ri Kōran), and Fujiwara Tei, I analyze how women energized and subverted the colonial project of Manchukuo through cultural products such as national policy films ( kokusaku eiga ) and repatriation literature ( hikiage bungaku ).

Research Interests

• 20th century Japanese literature and cinema
• Manchukuo literature and cinema
• Fragmented essay (Ch: suibi; J: zuihitsu)
• Women’s cultural production
• Empire, colonial, and postcolonial studies
• Comparative East Asian literature and cultures

Honors and Activities

• Fulbright-Hays Doctoral Dissertation Research Abroad (DDRA) Fellowship (2024)
• Stanford University Center for East Asian Studies (CEAS) Summer Grant (2023)
• Freeman Spogli Institute (FSI) Japan Fund Dissertation Grant (2022)
• Japan Society for the Promotion of Science (JSPS) Fellowship (2021, declined due to the Covid-19 pandemic)
• Stanford University Centennial Teaching Assistant Award (2021)
• Foreign Language and Area Studies (FLAS) Summer Award (2020)
• Stanford University Center for East Asian Studies (CEAS) Summer Grant (2018)
• Stanford University Asia Pacific Scholar Fellowship (2016)
• The Nippon Foundation Fellowship (IUC) (2015)
• Janssen Family Prize in Asian Studies (2014)